An adventure set in Mayan culture where Mayan cosmology and Christianity are blended together, and where women and men, animal spirits and ancestors, race together to the end of time.
Excerpt
Part I
Birth
Chapter 1
“Don’t you judge me,” Filomena said to Willadean. “Life is a suicide. We all die; we do it by living so long.”
“You didn’t live that long,” corrected Willadean.
The girl looked at her friend sadly. “If it wasn’t for the mescal,” she said, “I never would have fallen.”
“Don’t you mean jumped?” the older woman asked.
The cavern air was brown, but it was clear. There were no shadows. It was if light came from the air itself, as if each atom suspended there was a light particle. And it was true, what her friend had told her. Filomena felt much too young to be an ancestor.
“Jumped, fallen, I didn’t think about it like that. I was falling when I was sober, the second that lasted so long, like it was my whole life.”
She knew, of course, it had been her whole life, or what was left of it. She didn’t remember the part when she left the balcony, or the part when she suddenly wasn’t falling anymore. She only remembered the part when she was flying.
“The hands of Gravity are the hands of God,” said Willadean.
And that was true also. The physics of that world were undeniable.
Filomena exhaled slow, the air with its light and warmth passing through her lips. When she woke up here she had thought herself in hell, the place people go when they jump. But it was not hell. It was just under the mountain. And here the heart of time does not beat steady. She felt young, but couldn’t even say how long she had been here. Some days the two sides go hand in hand, but then a minute would last for days, and a year like an eyelash, blinked out with a tear.
She and Willadean sat on a cold slate ledge on the bank of a river. The stone step continued across to where water fell over its edge in a little waterfall, one of many, as the water continued from the slopes above down into the earth. There were small pools where bowls in the rock trapped the water, and in one of these pools a speckled brook trout was listening to their conversation. Others had overheard also. There was a man washing his face in the water as it flowed down above where the women sat, and there was a bumblebee the size of a hackey-sack ball hovering next to the fish, cooling its several feet in the little pool.
“I don’t see what difference this all makes,” said the fish. “You both came to the same place.”
Filomena knew it had been years. It had to have been many years. She and the other ancestors, and the animal spirits, the kanulob, were living together, and their living together pleased Filomena very much, because in the living she had been unable to kill herself, to extinguish herself, even though her sister Mina and her mother, and the boyfriend who had been celibate for almost a week after she was gone, didn’t know it. Filomena still felt alive.
The kanulob were her friends, better friends than she had when she was above the mountain, and certainly better than when she was on her own, in the town of the college, and of the balcony, and of the men who were her friend for their own purpose. An animal spirit, a kanul, shares a soul with a living person, and by sharing the soul they share a fate. Animal spirits can be injured and even killed, and when they are dead, as far as Filomena could tell, they were really gone. She had never known her own kanul. She was always busy with other things. She wondered about those days above the mountain, and if a bumblebee like Kasper had been her companion, if she would have hit so hard — if a flying insect could have helped her hover a little above the concrete. It wasn’t a question she was ever going to answer. Her kanul was dead. She had killed him too.
She saw her friend Willadean trying to ignore the fish, but the little trout just swam in circles. It was Willadean who had first told her about animal spirits, about how they help their people through perspective. Animals are good observers, and the perspective from under Witz Mountain gives them a sense of one’s surroundings. They can visit their two-legged half siblings in dreams, or nudge them in one direction or another, unless the human has the rare talent of puz nahual haleb, of becoming an animal, and being able to talk things out directly.
In the modern world, this talent is almost extinct.
“If you can tread water down there and still say we’re in the same place,” said Willadean to Paco the trout, “then you have a better imagination than I do. That’s like saying everyone above the mountain is living in the same place.”
Filomena thought back to that other life. Her friend was right again. People never live in the same place. Her place had been in the dusty countryside, a land of dirt and scrub and agave. Her only ambition had been to be around people from the other places, the places where people had enough of everything. She wanted friends with enough clothes and enough to eat, enough money and enough time to enjoy it. She had looked for men with enough, but had become just one more of all the things they had.
And now she was an ancestor, and ancestors help through experience. How many times had her friend told her this? It still seemed absurd, since she had died so young and couldn’t think of one experience that might be useful to anyone. Ancestors are the memory of a life, kept alive for a descendant who, one can only assume, will need to make use of it someday. Unlike the kanulob, the ancestors cannot take the initiative to buzz in the ears or snap at the heels of a human like the animals do. The descendants come to them for help. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, and Filomena assumed this one was no different. She took it on faith. Laws of physics are provided for each of the worlds according to its need, but other laws, like the law that laws are made to be broken, are universal, and reflect the personality of God.
She would never say that to Willadean.
The older woman was still glowering at Paco, making circles in his pool. “You always think you’re above everybody else,” said the fish, straining to look up at Willadean.
“Even in heaven,” said the woman, “the deathbed conversion doesn’t go to the same place as the person who was a saint all her life.”
“You’ve been to heaven?” said the bumblebee, looking wide eyed with all of his five eyes, including the eight thousand compound eye facets.
“Of course she hasn’t been to heaven,” said Paco.
The two women stood up and the bee strained to follow their movement. Filomena knew he couldn’t see very far under the mountain. The ultraviolet light he saw could penetrate clouds, but not rock.
“You don’t need to be there to know heaven,” said Willadean. “I was a churchwoman and a contemplative all my life, and caught more than one glimpse at God’s face.”
Shocked, his four wings slowed from two hundred to one hundred and fifty beats per second, and the rest of poor Kasper’s legs and his furry bottom were dunked into the water. He began to beat with dizzying swiftness, splashing and sending spray across the ripples in the pool. It was like his feet were glued to its shining surface, and the trout had to come up beneath him and give him a boost with his nose and little lower mandible where the overbite pushes up.
“Thanks,” said the bee, drying his wings and spraying the women.
“Hey!” the two ancestors shouted.
The insect ignored them. “You really saw his face?”
“It was pure, blinding white,” said Willadean.
“I don’t see white too well,” said the fish. “Mostly I see blue, and I always pictured him with blue and yellow spots.” He was swimming in circles again. “Something’s going to happen,” he said.
“Have you seen him?” the bumblebee asked, ignoring the fish, and buzzing over to young Filomena and hovering inches from her face.
“My mother always said we see him in strangers,” said the girl, “and especially in the poor, and you know, it always seemed like he was usually a she, and his face, I mean her face, was usually dirty; the women were always the poorest, and had the dirtiest faces.”
The older women just shook her head, the spots of water drying on her long white gown. “It’s no wonder your poor lost soul couldn’t find its way.”
Filomena was going to point out that, for being lost, she had ended up standing right here hip-to-hip next to the older churchwoman, but she already realized Willadean would not accept that from her any more than she would from a fish.
The old man was still bent over the swirling pools above them, still washing his face, and the man was laughing.
The ground shook, and pieces of debris filtered down like dust from rafters. Suddenly, Paco started to jump and swim in circles. “Damn,” he said, the words bubbling out of the now bubbling water. “I hate it when it does that. This one could be a pyroclastic flow. Ouch!”
The trout flipped out of the pool like a jumping salmon, except he headed downstream through the current, away from the hot mountain.
The bumblebee was rubbing dust out of his multiple eyes.
The old man wiped his face, using the tail of his white tunic. He was still laughing.
“If it’s hot enough old man, maybe you can finally get some of that dirt off,” called Willadean, looking back over her shoulder.
“It’s plenty hot,” he chuckled.
“What is so funny?” the woman asked.
“It’s just funny,” the face-washing man said. “All your life you thought you were going to die and know all the answers, but you don’t know shit.” Something caught his eye in the reflection in the pool and he let his tunic front drop and bent over to see. Filomena stepped up over the ledges of rock and stood next to him, looking into the water. Mancha padded up and sat down next to her. The three of them peered down, blinking, then the dog leaned over and put her muzzle into the pool and lapped up warm water.
The surface was turned to ripples.
“Do you mind?” asked Filomena.
“Sor-ry,” said the dog, with the accent on both syllables. “Don’t you ever get thirsty?” She stood at the edge of the pool and wagged her tail, as the others went back to looking.
Filomena saw a woman and a man lying next to each other in bed. In river eddies and shallow pools under the mountain you could sometimes see people above, see them and hear them and sometimes hear their thoughts. Just then another tremor hit. The water turned to ripples again as the mountain shook, Filomena almost slipped, and the woman in bed reached up to grab the headboard and steady herself.
“What was that?” the woman asked.
“The tremors of our love,” said the man. “You make the world tremble.”
“I’m getting up to see,” she said.
“No. Stay. It was nothing.”
“Javier might come back, if he felt the earthquake.”
“Forget Javier. Come with me today.”
“I want to,” the woman said. “But I’m afraid he would find me and kill me.” With her hand she swept the straight, jet black hair away from her dark eyes. “He said he would kill me if I ever cheated on him. I want to leave him, but I’m so afraid around him it’s like I’m paralyzed.”
“He cannot paralyze you unless you let him,” the man said.
“He paralyzes me.” She swung her legs around and off the bed, pulling a wrap around her beautiful form and tying it with a woolen belt.
“Don’t go,” the man pleaded.
“Please, let me go.”
“Aren’t you afraid you’re going to break my heart?”
“You should go,” she said.
Under the mountain Filomena watched the scene above, playing out in the reflection in the pool. The man reached for the woman, but his hand made it only halfway before the universe stopped. Half of the building disappeared, and all the atoms in all the universe he had ever known were condensed down into a single point, a point of infinite weight, and time itself came to a halt. Filomena was more than watching. She could almost feel what he felt, feel the shift, the brief tug at time’s unpredictable fabric, before, slowly, the universe began expanding outward again.
His legs were gone. There was a roof and a block wall, and a piece of the Witz Mountain the size of a car, sitting where he used to keep them. There was no blood, as if the arteries had been sealed under the tons of rock. If there was any pain, it was not there in his face.
The woman had just swung her legs off the bed and they had been spared, but in that instant when matter had been folded and unfolded, and sorted out in new ways, the blast had slammed her head against the headboard, her neck snapping and her eyes closing tight.
The man in the bed watched her. She was still breathing.
And her beautiful right arm had broken off.
It was broken off above the elbow, and the sharp edge of bone pushed in that instant between the man’s ribs and lodged where his heart lived. He lay still. It was as if the plug of bone was holding tight, wedged deep in his chest. The woman’s head and neck were awkwardly bent. Blood flowed freely from her severed arm, spurting forcefully, then less forcefully, as the red patches of dimpled skin around her frightfully beautiful nipples began to turn pale.
The man was careful not to turn his body, and took the tie from around the woman’s woolen wrap and tied it tight around that stub that was left of her arm. He pulled the knot tight, and the pulsing blood eventually stopped.
He lay motionless.
Finally, she was his woman. Even when his eyes were closed, his lips almost curved up into a smile. Amazingly she continued to breathe even though she lay unconscious. His breathing was hard and labored. He would turn his eyes to look at her every now and again. When he breathed in, a tear of pain appeared in the corner of his eye. You could almost hear the scraping of the woman’s bone against rib, shooting pain through the man. She was as close to him as any woman had ever been to a man. Time passed. The familiar universe was back, with people crying and the sounds of ambulances outside in the street. You could see him concentrating on his breathing. He never tried to cry out for help, as if he didn’t want the moment to come to an end. How could he know if his woman would live? How could he know if, outside of this moment, there would be anything left of him at all? He couldn’t know.
And then Javier came home.
He found his wife on Izek’s chest and in his arms, or rather, found her arm in Izek’s chest. He stood over them, looking horrified.
“I would kill you,” Javier said to Izek, “if God had not already done it!”
Only half of Izek remained, and it was breathing so fast he could say nothing. He was trying to breathe without moving his chest, but as if suddenly craving air he would suck it in jealously, only to have the tears of pain well up in his eyes. Perhaps Javier thought they were tears of fear, but Filomena knew they were tears of pain, and only came when the poor man tried to claim a portion of air for himself. Even knowing that the air belonged to a world he no longer had any claim to, that soon he would have no part in at all, there was no fear.
But he was clearly afraid for her.
The husband went to pull the woman Melva off the man, grabbing her by the head. When he pulled her head the body didn’t move, like the two were not connected. Then the woman’s arms and legs jerked in rigid spasms, like the legs of a pithed frog. The arm flew up, and, even wedged tightly between the ribs, it pulled free of the man’s chest, leaving the ventricle of his heart open to the wide world.
It took less than a second and it took forever, to the end of his life. The man Izek saw the spastic limbs of his lover, all three and a half, go flaccid. He saw his blood covering Javier’s work clothes. He saw his woman’s face, still calm, a million miles away, unaware of what was happening in her convulsing body. He must have seen the darkness coming.
Filomena heard Mancha whimper, and saw tears well up in her eyes. “I knew his kanul,” the dog said, sadly. At that moment, somewhere in the forest on the side of the mountain, an emerald-billed toucanet fell from its tree.
When Izek woke up, he was staring into the eyes of an old man standing over him. The man was holding the sleeve of a tunic like it was a towel, and he must have looked like he was washing his face with it. There was warm breath on Izek’s face, and a street dog the color of corn masa leaning down to sniff him. It must have seemed a strange way to be welcomed into death. There was nothing so earthy as the breath of a dog.
“What is this?” asked Filomena, “a morality play? I thought they were a good couple.”
“Not a morality play,” said the old man. “God’s own physics.”
And then, with the understanding of an ancestor who had been to college, and had watched the moving world’s actions and reactions, the girl Filomena saw it for what it was, applied mechanics, no more and no less. The compressive load applied by the small surface of broken bone-edge had simply exceeded the elastic limit of the strength of the tissue between the ribs. It was a simple college physics problem, and elastic limits and shear forces were as much the hand of God as the law of gravity, and the forces that her own body had arrogantly and clumsily tried to cheat. She had deserved her death no more than this beautiful man had deserved to have his heart emptied of its blood. It was simply their mortal inability to resist the will of God.
And Filomena thought of her mother, and something she had said. In old Mexico, the symbol for the present age of man was the same as the Aztec symbol for earthquake. She guessed it was about twenty more years until the end of that age, until that year they spoke about, 2012, and wondered how many more earthquakes she would see, and how many more deaths. Filomena looked down at this man Izek with friendly eyes, eyes that might have had more in them in another world, above the weight of this mountain, but here under the brown sky what they had in them was compassion.
Read more about 2012: Under the Witz Mountain and Michael Weddle HERE.
Copyright 2008 Michael Weddle. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
Post a Comment