“Will no one take you?”
“I haven’t really tried.” I pushed the box of bones over to him. “Think of me pursuing a course of study as an independent scholar.”
Barry Buster nodded a few times. He picked up the box and put it on a shelf. “Katherine, how did you come by these bones?”
I pondered this for a moment, but the answer was fairly obvious. “Barry,” I said, “I inherited them.”
Barry had to rush back to his apartment, where Gaia had spent the morning packing the car. He offered to share a cab with me.
“We live near Frida Kahlo’s house and Trotsky’s house, and there’s a museum, designed by Diego Rivera to look like a temple in the area. Very impressive in a kind of primitive, artsy, kitschy way. You must see it before you leave.”
“Thanks, Barry,” I said. “I will, but I haven’t had a chance to look around here yet.” I gestured over my shoulder back at the Anthropological Museum.
Barry gave me a big hug and an inappropriate kiss. He got into a taxi and, waving out the window, called, “Keep in touch. Maybe I’ll come visit.”
The museum was quiet and airy. I was excited to be there and momentarily forgot why I’d come to Mexico. Pre-Columbian art had been my favorite class, and not just because I was sleeping with Barry Buster. In fact, I think I started sleeping with him because I appreciated the course so much. I stopped in front of an enormous statue of Coatlicue, goddess of life, death, and the earth. The statue must have been fifteen feet tall. I have no idea how much it weighed. Coatlicue’s head was crowned with grinning skulls. Her necklace had a large skull pendant, the chain strung together with dismembered hands and something, which at first looked like grenades—goddess of explosions?—but after closer inspection, turned out to be hearts. To the Aztecs, who saw actual human hearts with fair frequency, this must have been an easily recognized motif. At first, I found this gory, but then I changed my mind. What made the ubiquitous candy-box type heart that I saw everywhere more acceptable, other than the fact that it was anatomically incorrect? How many heart-shaped chocolates had I eaten in my time? Anything heart-shaped should remind us of our bloody muscle, tick-ticking away. I placed my hand over my own heart and felt the comfort of its drumming.
In the courtyard outside a fountain trickled appealingly. The light was dim and with all the artifacts and murals surrounding me, it was easy to imagine myself not in the museum, but in a temple. I almost felt convinced of the Aztec concept of time. To the Aztecs, time was no more abstract than anything else and was a real commodity owned and operated by the various gods. If one adopted this definition, all the subjects of the art—kings, vassals, artisans, villains, and victims—could have been running through the matter of their lives in the next room.
I stopped at the great wheel that was the sun stone. This calendar had dominated the lives of the Aztecs. It was their belief that the world ran in fifty-two-year cycles, and at the end of this cycle a great cataclysm would occur. A new phase of history of the One World would begin. I wondered what it was like for Montezuma in those last days before Aztec time—all the billions of days so carefully recorded in katun, baktun, pictun, calabtun, kinchiltun, stringing out from zero and chillingly accurate—suddenly and permanently ceased.
My errand in Mexico was done but my plane didn’t leave for another two days. I called the real estate agent to see if she had listed the property.
“I’m listing it at one million,” she said.
“Do you think it’s worth that much?”
“It is if someone pays that much. The house is four thousand square feet and the lot is,” I heard her rifling through papers, “over twenty acres. We could ask for more, but I think we’re better off listing it at market rate.”
“All right,” I said. She checked my address and phone number. She’d forgotten to have me sign the agency agreement, but once that was taken care of, we could move forward. I’d had no idea the house was that valuable. All this good news ought to have made me happy, but the whole thing seemed bizarre, as if I was watching my life unfold on TV, so I found it hard to celebrate. Also, the hotel room was beginning to make me feel uncomfortable.
I never liked hotel rooms, a leftover from a childhood trauma. When I was five, after some terrible fight between my parents, my mother had run away with me. I’m not sure where we went. I remember us driving for hours. She was screaming and crying on and off. We pulled into a motel parking lot and my mother got us a room. It was late at this point and I was hungry. I think my mother left to get food, but she was gone a long time. I brushed my teeth, put on my pajamas and waited. I fell asleep on the bedcovers. The next morning, she still wasn’t there. I didn’t know what to do. When the cleaning woman came in at eleven, she found me crying. She took me to the office and she and the office manager, an Indian man with children of his own, listened to my story with the appropriate concern. His wife made a big lunch for me—pan-fried Spam and rice—then sat with me on the couch in her odd-smelling living room. We watched a video that was all in Hindi, a romance with men in turbans spying on gorgeous saried women from behind trees. She translated each exchange,
“He says she is very, very beautiful.”
“She says he is very, very handsome.”
“Now they are singing about love.”
And then my father showed up with a wad of bills (I remember them refusing the money, citing my good behavior) and drove me home.
My mother went into the hospital after that and was gone a long time.
Years later, I asked my mother about it. She was surprised that I remembered the motel incident, because no one ever mentioned it at home. “I should have left him then,” she said. “I wanted to.”
“Why didn’t you?”
My mother looked at me, surprised that I didn’t already know. “Because of you,” she said. “And he puts up with me because he thinks that a child should have her mother. Children always love their mothers. Even Romulus and Remus loved their mother, and she was a wolf.”
This was an odd moment of tenderness for us so I didn’t point out—even though I thought it at the time—that Romulus and Remus were adopted.
I thought I should get out of town. I wanted to go to Teotihuacan to see the Toltec pyramids, so armed with a map, I took the subway to the bus station. Once there, I discovered that I was at the wrong bus station, that the one I needed was the northern station—a good two hours from where I was.
“Well, what’s south?” I asked.
The ticket vendor looked at a bus schedule. His eyebrows came together in the same way as I imagined a doctor’s would had he discovered a grapefruit-size tumor in my cranium. “There is one bus for Tepochtlan in fifteen minutes.”
“What’s in Tepochtlan?”
“They make the wooden spoon.”
“For what?”
“For the chocolate.”
“Can I look at that?” I asked, gesturing at the schedule.
“Yes,” he said, pushing the schedule across with the same solemnity, “but it is incorrect.”
I nodded to myself. I looked around the train station. A group of religious kids—or so I assumed from their matching “Jesus Lives” T-shirts—were massing around their suitcases. “Where are they going?” I asked, pointing.
“They are going to Cuernavaca.”
“Why are they going to Cuernavaca?”
“Because it is a very nice place with nice restaurants and beautiful food. There is a palace also of Cortes.”
Cuernavaca. I remembered Malcolm Lowry’s doomed British consul. “And when does the bus to Cuernavaca leave?”
“It leaves forty-five minutes ago.”