She drove them in her Volvo to Cuernavaca and in Guadalajara to stand beneath the Rivera murals (on postcards to each of their daughters and their son Lyndsay wrote how, when she was a student articled to a law firm, she had bought with her first earnings as a weekend waitress a cheap print of Rivera's girl with arum lilies). They climbed the great pyramids without getting too out of breath, explained to the admiring Norwegian that this was because they came from a high-altitude city at home, were accustomed to rarefied air. The guide was admiring of everything, of the phenomenon of life itself, smiling ruthlessly, a kind of well-being, even to be seen in profile by whoever (taking turns) sat beside her while she drove. She was well-rounded but not the obligatory Scandinavian blue-eyed blonde, careless curly dark hair blew back or played tendrils on her pink forehead. Smiling was the natural muscular conformation of her face evidently, even when she was not talking or listening in response. A person with a happy nature, born like that, Lyndsay remarked as she and Adrian summed up the experience of the second day with their unexpected find. Who knows, Adrian said. And of course, the professional archaic smile is part of the tourist guide's package. Anyway she was a pleasant accompaniment, extremely useful to their venture. She was even worldly, intelligent enough to want to be told something of their own country, how it had changed since the end of apartheid (she pronounced the word correctly) – but then Norwegians, people from comfortably stable regions always have an interest, concern born of their contrasting good luck, perhaps, for countries great in area and conflict. Both of them must have had the passing thought, during these happy days of venture, how did this Scandinavian come to be a guide in Mexico. Just because she was fluent in Spanish and English? But there was no wish to be distracted, by a stranger's personal history, from the fascination of the specialised knowledge of medicine in a lost civilisation evidenced by instruments in a glass showcase, and the huge unfurlment of the Ambras Emerald-feather head-dress tall as any man who might have been exalted enough to wear it. These spectacles were on the site, in the place they continued to prize best and return to of all others, famous, or some obscure but known to one as serenely experienced as their Norwegian. This place was the Museum of Anthropology back in Mexico City, inadequately named they at once discovered, for the Dantesque journey through not only the evolution of the human being but on to an unsurpassed achievement of certain skills.
– And hubris. – Adrian 's remark as Lyndsay took his hand in confirmation of what they were experiencing together.
Then they were walking the length of the Teotihuacán plumed serpent uncoiled, grey-green. They had seen so many colours and textures hewn from the millennial formations of mountains, and transformed into another, human version of the Creation. Jadeite? Adrian guessed, and was gently corrected by their guide. – Polychrome. It's a full-scale model of the original, too huge to transport, sixth to eighth century a.d. – They were distracted by a giant Mayan eagle above them, unmistakably stone, with menacing beak open in full cry. When they were resting on their hotel bed before dinner Lyndsay was to say that the statement of colossi, relics of an exalted civilisation that Cortés and his successors toppled, came to her suddenly with Adrian's And hubris as a flashback of the plane plunging into the second of the World Trade Center towers.
Adrian dozing: Of course, we understand the present a bit better by knowing the past.
Of course: Adrian, missed vocation in archaeology.
What they had both lingered before, irresistible and oddly stirring, was a cinema-sized screen of juxtaposed images, like a series of enlarged passport photographs. But the images were not static, fixed. Each was a skull that changed in the next take and the next, the blink of the camera of time, the bone structure modified, angles and emphasis receded, realigned, flesh-covering emerged, shaping nose, outlining the apertures of eyes and mouth, then flick-flick – a generic human face evolving into a recognisable one: Asiatic, Caucasian, Negroid, the round eyes, the epicanthal folds, the arched nose, the malleable-looking broad flat one, the soft everted lips, the straight thin line in which others meet.
Passport photographs of more than one's ancestry back to a common design of bone. Lyndsay was unaccustomedly loud-voiced although there were other tourists around: – It's a kind of DNA! – And they stood unable to leave the exhibit, now quietly, amusedly pointing out to each other, youngsters exchanging secrets, look how that one's exactly like so-and-so, that one definitely tells that so-and-so has Japanese blood somewhere. And what about us, mmh? Each born of the Western European type that had been two or three generations in Africa; isn't there likely to be some mutation, detail of feature or flesh that records entry of a black strain, not just the evolutionary effect of climate and elements of nouriture. And the juxta-presence of other strains, Malays, Indians, Chinese, all come to Africa over generations. They must take a new good look at the face of the other in the nakedness of a shared bathroom, when he's exposed, freshly shaven, and make-up has been creamed-off her public image. The guide stands by smiling. She must've seen it all numerous times before; she is not quite recognisable, anyway, as the definitive Scandinavian type. Mixed exotic interruptions, not an unbroken lineage – what about the Vikings? Their ventures? Great voyagers, maybe their encounters mixed the bloodstock of ancestry. Lyndsay is so rousedly interested that Adrian says to her, not remembering that once she used to say to him, You would have made a good lawyer – You would have been a good anthropologist. – At least as an avocation, like archaeology, but of course law was both vocation and avocation, for her. And with the smiling onlooker, they laughed. Over lunch Adrian offered at a Chinese restaurant their guide recommended (unexpected find in Mexico, like herself), she said with her way of stretching her soft full throat and turning her head back and to one side, they were the most enthusiastic people she'd taken around for years. A compliment is always pleasing. They raised their glasses of Chinese beer to her expertise and tact.
Lyndsay had an important case coming up, one of those arising out of a government agency's inquiries into corruption between government officials, highly-placed politicians, and what is collectively called private enterprise, which includes cabinet members – stockholders in the businesses of their cousins and in-laws. She had to return to prepare with her partners the defence of one of the accused. Adrian knew better than to ask if she really believed the man was not guilty. But he thought it absolutely unnecessary for her to have to return while she was enjoying their new venture so much; why couldn't her partners do without her for once. What did she have partners for, if one could not stand in for another who had worked so hard and selflessly for years. He did not refer to the leave she had taken for frequent absences overseas, those years ago. So long ago.