When we got to the base of it, we could no longer see her up there. I put the flashlight down and looked at the dimensions of the steps. They were about twenty inches high and only about eight to ten inches deep. So the way to go was almost on all fours, to lean into the slope and use the fingers on the steps for balance. I told Meyer this would be the best way, and I heard him sigh.
Once one was into the rhythm of it, it was not bad. The full heat of the day had not yet arrived. It was a long climb. I tried not to think about going down. I waited near the top until Meyer was on the same level, about six feet to my left. She bent and caught his hand and helped him up the final tall step. I scrambled up. She smiled at us. She encompassed all the world in one sweep of her arm and said, “Look! Just look!”
I did not feel at all comfortable about standing on that small flat top. It was only about four feet by eight feet, and it fell steeply away in all directions. We were so high above the jungle that it looked like a dark green shag rug. The sun was two widths above the horizon. She pointed and said, “See that little silvery glint out there, like a needle beyond the trees? That’s the Caribbean. Over thirty miles from here. Look down that way. See? There is the pink car. It is so glorious up here in the morning!”
To my relief she sat down, legs hanging over the rubbly slope on the side opposite the one we had climbed. We sat on either side of her. She pointed out smaller pyramids that poked out of the trees.
I said, “Is it part of being Maya? I mean, to come here when someone has died?”
“Not really. I don’t know. Maybe they did that. It all ended hundreds of years ago. By the time the Spaniards came, it was already over. Archaeologists make up stories about what it was like in the Mayan cities, trying to read old stelae and glyphs, and other archaeologists translate in some other, way and make furious objections. We do know that the classical period ended five hundred years before the Spanish came. The Maya abandoned their cities and temples, moved away, went off into the jungles. Why? No one knows. They thought it was because the land would no longer produce. But that has been proven false. They dug channels through swamps, piled the muck on the center rows between the channels, grew water lilies, and racked them up onto the long mounds to decay there. It was sophisticated agriculture and very productive. Tikal was the greatest city of all, to the south of where we are, in Guatemala. Perhaps two hundred thousand people lived there. It was a center of commerce on the rivers and the sea. This Coba was one of the strange old cities. Like Chichen, Uxmal, Palenque, Bonampak, Yaxchilan. I have been to the others, but it is only here in this place I feel… part of it. As if it pulls upon my heart. We were a bloody people long ago, even before the Toltec, with rites, ceremonies, processions, blood sacrifices. And we had measurements of time going back eight million years. I was in Canada when my father died. When I was able to come back, I came to this place as soon as I could, and I sat here at dawn and said his Mayan name one hundred times as the sun came up. They gave him the name Pedro Castillo because they could not say his real name.”
When she said it, it sounded like “Pakal.” But the P was more explosive than the P sound in English, and there was a coughing sound to the x. The r, was odd, as if during it she moved her tongue from the back of the roof of her mouth toward the front, giving it the value of “ulla.”
“It was believed that he was descended from priests. Some priests became kings and then became gods. He would have been seen as a tall man anywhere, but he was very tall for a Maya. And my Mayan name is…”
If I’d had to spell it, it would have been Alklashakeh. The vowels were purred, the sibilants rich.
“It is all over,” she said, “and yet it isn’t over. I do not know why I was moved to say his name, and William’s name, one hundred times at dawn from here. But it made me feel better both times, as if they were afloat in death and I had moved them to a safe shore. Do you know that deep in the jungle there are small secret villages where men with guns still guard hidden idols from everyone except the deserving Maya? The holy figures sit there in the dark huts, remembering everything.”
She shrugged off her sadness and asked us to swivel around to face in another direction, toward a small nearby body of water and a cluster of tile-roofed buildings.
“There is the hotel,” she said. “There is a lake in front of it. See? And the old Mayan road went across that lake on a causeway, and it went all the way through the jungle, all the way to Chichen Itza. It was wide enough for a carriage, but they did not have wheels, it is said. If they did not have wheels, then why does one ancient wall at Chichen clearly show the meshing of the cogs of three wheels as in the gears of some machine? If they did not have wheels, how is it so that a giant roller was found here at Coba, weighing tons, and was used to crush and flatten the limestone out of which they built that road? It went off that way, beyond that lake, for fifty miles. It is now all narrow and rough. But it is a trail that goes from here to Chichen and from Chichem to Uxmal. We were not animals. There was a culture here.”
Meyer shook his head. “I’m not ready for all that, Barbara. I am still trying to comprehend the thing I am sitting on here, to comprehend the skill and devotion and determination it took to raise up this gigantic pyramid. I was about to say in the middle of nowhere. For them it was perhaps the middle of the universe.”
She looked questioningly at me. “Was it worth getting up in the middle of the night?”
“It was. It is.”
“You came up the right way. Go down the same way now, backward. Look down between your thighs and around your hips to see the next steps. If any rock step wiggles, take your weight from it at once. Sometimes they fall. People fall with them. Tourists burst their brains on the stone. There is talk about making it forbidden to climb the pyramids. What is life if all risk is taken away? Go down now, if you are ready. There is only one more thing I want to say to myself up here.”
By the time we reached the bottom, with almost simultaneous sighs of relief, Barbara was on her way down, quick-moving, graceful, assured. She turned and jumped down the last few steps, dusted her hands, smiled at us.
She walked toward us in the bright shadow of morning, in a flow of side light, her skin the shade of coffee with cream, or of cinnamon, fine-grained, with a matte finish, flawless and lovely.
We walked back to the car slowly, and she told us what she knew of the place. We took a side trip down a narrow winding path to look at a stele, a huge one, broken into three parts and re-erected, protected by a thatched roof, the carving on it so worn it was almost invisible.
At the ticket shack, she called the man out and walked over to the side with him, talked to him, gave him some money. We got into the car and drove to the hotel we had seen from the top. It was by then seven fifteen and there were six Japanese in the dining room having an exotic breakfast of huevos rancheros. We sat where we could look out at a small garden. She insisted that it would be her treat.
“Now then,” she said, as coffee cups were refilled, “you know the other name this person uses?”
“And a post office box number in Cancun,” Meyer said. “Box seven ten.”
“There is no mail delivery down the highway,” she said. “You rent a box in whatever city you are near. And near can be eighty miles.”
“In any direction?” Meyer asked.
“Only going south… Along the highway toward Merida, for example, you would not go that far before you would get your mail in Valladolid. Tell me. What is his name?”
“Roberto Hoffmann.”
She sat so very still I had the feeling she was not even breathing. Then she slumped. “For one moment I thought there was something I would remember about that name. All I know is that I have heard it. I do not know when or where. But it is a common name. Anyway, there will be no trouble finding him. No trouble at all, if such a person exists.”