He will come here, to the place of his throne and his canopy, for that is what he promised when he departed.
                                                                                                                        —The Codex Florentino
 

        The others go uphill from the dig to the camp at noon under the clogging yellow sun, but he stays back a moment longer to kneel in the crumbling brown dirt and run his callused forefinger across the shards of half-exposed pottery.  Bits of dry soil fall under his fingers in a soft cascade of dust.  Behind him the sea washes out in shades of clear and deepening blue to the edge of the trailing sky.  The air is thick and hot:  in Mexico, the sun becomes the sky, radiating light from each polished crevice, from behind the occasional thin cloud, above the dark and swirling birds.  If he looks up over the grassy outcropping, along the rise in the land, he can see the makeshift camp: a few dusty pickup trucks, two long picnic tables, the belching grill that fills the air with the scent of burning meat and the screeching of the gulls.  Figures crowd around holding metal mess tins while Marcia flips hamburgers with casual flair.  She is his wife; they have been married for eight months.  He looks at her in her khaki shorts and blue t-shirt, her short blonde hair tied back jauntily with a green bandana.  The hair is dyed.  He had not learned that until after they were married.  Naturally, she is a brunette.  He understands that the sight of her should bring him happiness.
         She is passing out the hamburgers and the figures filter gradually over to the tables. They are university students, American, mostly, and some British, in Mexico for the summer studying precolumbian ruins.  He had discovered the pottery in May, one Sunday when he and Marcia had decided to drive down to the beach at Veracruz. I want to lie out and bake, Marcia had said.  Owen doesn’t like sunbathing.  His stepsister, Gwendolyn, tells him he is courting skin cancer already, working, as he does, in the sun.  He wears lotion every day; his skin tans only faintly.  You get your fair skin from your mother, his father had told him when he was a child.  His mother had hanged herself in the library of their house in San Diego when he was four.  It was his older brother Julian who found her in the afternoon.  Julian was six, in Owen’s eyes almost an adult, had gone into the library after Owen and their father brought him home from the elementary school on Delaney Street. He has a distinct memory of Julian running screaming through the house, of Julian huddled shrieking in the corner of the dining room, his white round face clutched against his knees, his hands covering his ears, his fingernails drawing blood at his hairline.  The ambulance had come and taken away her swollen body in a clamor of lights and sirens and she had lived.  They had gone to the hospital on the day she was to be released and a pretty nurse with yellow hair and a sorry face told them that she was gone, that she had checked herself out two hours earlier.  The divorce papers arrived by messenger the next week.
        Years later, after his father’s death, Owen had gone back to San Diego, back to the lawyers, and read the file.  It’s confidential, the secretary told him in a soft drawl. You need permission from the surviving party.  He sat down firmly in an uncomfortable plush chair in the main reception room, recently and tastefully redecorated in grey and burgundy that would never show dirt, and said: So get permission, surprised himself at his own determination.   And while the secretary spoke on a touch-tone telephone to his mother who had gone away, he imagined the furnishings older, faded, still bland but then a little grimy, the way age shows first at the edges, first in the eyes and fingers, first in profile. Your son, the secretary said, and then tilted the mouthpiece away from her glistening painted lips and said: Which one?  She wants to know which one.  He said: Owen, and then, in clarification, the youngest.  The secretary held out the phone, said: Will you speak to her?  And his throat had closed, his lungs crumpled, and he could only shake his head no, no, he wouldn’t.  He isn’t angry; he understands that she had chosen survival, but he won’t speak to her, won’t allow her to give him evidence of her existence.  He doesn’t remember her, really, except for vague sensory impressions, the coolness of linen, the soft sour warmth of her neck, and he thinks it’s better that way, wants her to exist only in his mind, in photographs and letters, which are like a corpse the physical debris of whatever it is that fills the body, of whatever it was that she had tried so hard to extinguish that day in San Diego.
        The secretary had put down the phone and handed him the file, said:  Her number’s inside.  She says to call her if you need her.  And that was all, like an epilogue, an obituary.  The divorce was uncontested, on the grounds of incompatibility—such a strange and emotionless word, he thinks, masking such incomprehensible passion—with full custody of herein named children given to Charles Lucien Stanley on the grounds of the mental instability of Julia Stanley née Merritt, that too uncontested.  And there in smudged onionskin carbon he had felt his parents recede from him, felt them blur and refocus, typewritten characters in the printed dialogue of a play, names without physical presence.  No money had changed hands during the divorce, but afterwards his father, who had inherited money, set up a trust fund in her name.  The correspondence over the years had come from all over the world—India, Japan, Egypt.  He had copied down the most recent, a post office box in Nairobi, into his address book, and had used it only once, twelve years later, when he sent her a postcard of the church of San Sebastian: Married 12 April in Mexico City.  Her name is Marcia.  —OMS.  And no return address.  He didn’t want a response.  He had affixed the stamps neatly and stuck it resolutely in the mailbox and had reminded himself fleetingly of the scientists who send radio messages into the galaxies bearing news of life on earth, a transmission into the void, the recipient a phantom, a possibility.  By now he barely believes that she exists.
         Marcia says: "I brought you lunch."  She’s standing beside him, holding two identical tin plates.  From the camp, he can hear music.  One of the students, a lanky, earringed blond named Trevor, has a battery-operated CD player. Unfortunately, he only has one CD, Pink Floyd The Wall, CD2 (CD1 having been left, in the confusion of packing, in Manchester).  He plays it over and over again, and after three weeks the entire crew, Owen and Marcia included, had chipped in enough money to go en masse to the HMV in Veracruz and argue bitterly for an hour and forty-five minutes about the choice of a replacement.  Eventually Owen had made the executive decision that they should buy whatever was currently numero uno on the charts, and so they had purchased the Spice Girls’s debut album and brought it back in triumph to the hotel.  Trevor won’t play it.  He says that as long as he is living, he won’t allow his discman to be so violated.
Owen takes the plate and smiles at her absently. "Thanks."
         They sit crosslegged in the sand and eat.  She knows that he likes mustard and onions on his hamburgers, a pickle on the side.  It is a strange thing, he thinks, marriage, this state of being on the one hand so completely known and on the other so utterly alien. He remembers when they were first married, when he had learned that she brushes her teeth before breakfast, wanders around the flat every Thursday night wearing a mud masque, sits on the toilet with her pyjama pants around her ankles and reads Rolling Stone in Spanish.  They subscribe, although Owen has never opened a copy.  She is thirteen years his junior, twenty-five.  They were married by a judge in Mexico City.  Owen had always assumed that women liked big weddings.  His stepmother, Isabel, has been married three times—his father was the second—and always with a dauntingly large reception. When she had married the third, Jack, Owen was seventeen, his father dead for four years already.  He and Julian had stood awkwardly on the lawn of the house in Greenwich, drinking gin and tonics with grim and resolute purpose while their half-sisters, the twins, Magda and Lucia, raced delightedly through the guests.  Owen was always fascinated by cocktail parties, by the silk-enveloped clusters, the men in crisp and bulging black and white, smoking cigars, slim-calved women trailing cigarettes, the men drinking scotch and water, scotch on the rocks, the women holding champagne, delicate flutes that in their manicured hands took on a separate entity, the pale bubbling liquid swaying as the glass moved to emphasize a point, a sip at the end of a sentence, that elegant sophistication, jeweled ennui.
         When his mother left, his father put everything they owned into a compartment at LOCK-IT-UP storage (we keep it safe, you keep the key) outside of San Diego and took Owen and Julian to South America.  For three years they had lived nowhere and everywhere, always in transit.  Charles Stanley was a geologist, and they had gone with him, looking for the gold that he had seen not as wealth but rather as evidence of divine will, the remnants of a previous age, one so distant as to be beyond the reaches of history, and yet like all things leaving its mark on the land.  The land is like a book, he had told them.  If you can understand its language it will speak to you.  Owen remembers his childhood as a blur of identical hotel rooms and prefabricated mine camps, wriggling down ladders into preliminary shafts, the darkness underground and the shadows of the safety candles, chasing after Julian through the murky puddles.  Julian didn’t like to leave the main adits, the horizontal exploration tunnels where their father led investors and executives, speaking of ore grades and development muck, but Owen would scramble up with the miners into the narrow raises, snaking crawlspaces that followed the veins of metal.  He had believed in each mountain as a living thing, wedged himself deep in the cool damp rock, the darkness underground, clutched uncollected till against his stomach, between his bent knees, believed himself held in the arms of millenium.  El oro, said the dark faced miners, their skin slick and glinting in the reflection of their headlamps, and they ran their fingers along the dull stuff in the rock.  He remembers that they had touched it with reverence but without greed:  they above all understood that it brought wealth only to the inconceivably distant.
         He remembers riding in helicopters over the Andes, his father pointing out the patterns of coloration in the mountains that indicated limestone deposits, gold, silver, copper, remembers the air rushing against their faces, the dizzying height, the sliding mountains, the thundering of the rotor blades above their heads.  They had driven for hours in the back seats of company jeeps along sharp switchbacked roads that fell steeply off at the edges in drops that seemed almost vertical.  Even now he never locks car doors, won’t wear a seatbelt.  Jump, his father had instructed them in the hotel rooms every morning before expeditions, Owen and Julian sitting obediently on the edge of the bed while he knelt in front of them, holding their small hands in his large rough ones. If the car goes over the edge, open your door and jump.  It had never happened, but always he warned them, his face heavy with intensity, his dark blue eyes meeting theirs levelly; he never shielded them from the truth.  Perhaps he had known by then that there was nothing he could protect them from, not anymore, had known he could not erase that day in San Diego, that the mind like stone is pressed and folded in the constant shifting of continental plates, run through with quartz, present infiltrating the past.  I am telling you this because you could die.
         "What are you thinking about?" Marcia asks him, tilting her head a little to the right.
         "Nothing, really," he says.  He’s never spoken to her about his childhood, evades her questions and she never presses him.  She grew up in a disturbingly functional family in Liberty, Michigan.  Mr. McCormack—Ralph, for heaven’s sake, man, I’m not that old—sells insurance, and Mrs. McCormack makes the best artichoke dip in Liberty.  There are two brothers, one older, one younger.  The family calls at Thanksgiving (a couple just starting out doesn’t need the added expense of international calls, Ralph says, although at thirty-eight, the joint beneficiary—with Julian and the twins—of a substantial trust fund, Owen is uncertain that he qualifies as just starting out).  They pass the phone back and forth until every member of the family has had the chance to talk to Marcia and, to his amazement, Owen.  The McCormacks want to hear every detail of the excavation, speculations on the direction of Mexican politics, the latest in the ongoing saga of the redecoration of the apartment.  The first painter, Horacio, had mixed them up with someone else and wallpapered their bedroom in a dizzying pattern of obscenely large magenta roses whose thorn-studded vines sworled malignantly around their headboard.  The second painter, whose name was Alejandro, had ripped off the wallpaper and, due in large part to Marcia’s atrocious Spanish, painted the entire room, including the floor, pale green.  Finally they hired an old man named Angel, a friend of a casual acquaintance, who proceeded to suffer a heart attack while moving his ladder.  They came home one evening to find him sprawled out dead on the pastel floorboards, his arms stretched above his head as if in horizontal incantation.  It’s a message from God, Marcia had said as they stood in the unfurnished living room, waiting for the ambulance.  He wants us to leave well enough alone. The McCormacks think it’s hilarious.  They laugh richly through the telephone cables, make noises of horrified delight.  You take care of yourself, now, Mrs. McCormack tells him, and Ralph booms:  And you take care of my girl, too.  To Marcia they say:  Remember we love you, in tones that indicate it is the most important thing and simultaneously the most casual, and she says:  I will, and I love you.  Owen is mystified by such careless declarations.  In his own family, love is like death:  to speak of it is irreverence.
         "Nothing?" Marcia says, smiling, and reaches out hesitantly to brush his untidy hair out of his eyes. "I’ve never seen you thinking about nothing before." He lets her touch him because he doesn’t want to hurt her, to throw her gestures back in her face.  He knows that whatever separates them is his fault.  It’s not that he doesn’t love her, only that sometimes she strikes him as unforgivably young.  When they had fallen in love he had been addicted to her happiness.  He had thought that she carried it with her, that it suffused every room she entered the way light falls evenly through open drapes, the way women trail perfume like an intangible cloak.  Now he cannot talk to her; now he believes that if he speaks he will corrupt the very thing that made him love her.  She says he shuts her out; in eight months he has watched her grow uncertain, her very movement tinged with reservations.  He is helpless.  He believes that either way he will destroy her.
         He says awkwardly. "Well, you know, just the dig."
         She says:  "We’re getting a lot of really amazing pieces.  The craftsmanship is fabulous."  She is an artist, not an archaeologist, sketches the pieces as they are unearthed. That was how they met, working at a dig outside Mexico City.  He had brought her a tall vase to be drawn and believed insanely that she had the most beautiful freckles he had ever seen.  It had taken him three weeks to work up the nerve to ask her to dinner, and he had been completely taken aback when she accepted.  He had known perfectly well even then that he was too old for her, although at the time he had thought it was in years.  He allows her to believe that Julia is dead, although he has never explicitly said so.  It is easier that way.  He doesn’t want her to know that in parallel worlds six year olds come home from school and find their mothers choking at the end of mainsail halyards in the library, that family evaporates, leaving behind only a lawyer’s file, temporary addresses, that weddings replace the vanished in a shower of birdseed and champagne.
         He says:  "I was thinking about Cortes.  About how he landed here and the Aztecs thought he was Quetzalcoatl, fulfilling his promise to come back."  He’s not lying.  He has thought about it, had been struck by it the day he and Marcia had found bits of pottery in the sand.  It was not the Aztecs whom Cortes had met at Veracruz but rather the Cempoaltecas, one of the tributary nations under Aztec control.  It is the remains of one of the Cempoalteca villages that they are excavating, although as of yet they have found little that resembles the foundation of a house.
         Marcia says:  "I always liked La Malinche.  I mean, I wonder why she joined them. Did she hate her own people so much that she wanted to see them massacred or was she really in love with Cortes or what?"  La Malinche was Cortes’ interpreter and mistress.  She had translated the Nahuatl of the Aztecs into Mayan, and then Jeronimo de Aguilar, a Spanish sailor who had been shipwrecked in Yucatan and spent eight years with the Mayans, translated La Malinche’s Mayan into Spanish.
         Owen shrugs, swallows a mouthful of hamburger. "Who knows.  They had a child, although I don’t suppose that means anything."
         She says, "It means something," and he looks at her suddenly but she’s staring outat the ocean.  They’ve never talked about children.  He supposes he ought to want somebut the thought frightens him.  He doesn’t want to leave anything behind when he dies, wants to die cleanly, without legacy.  Charles Stanley had been killed in Chile, driving by himself up to a mine in the Andes when Owen was thirteen.  The car had gone over the edge.  There was no evidence of a struggle, the voice had said through the line; he died without any trace of desperation, without opening his door.  This was unlike him.  He was a quick man, impulsive.  Owen had refused to believe that he would die without a struggle, had assumed without curiosity that it was suicide, that his father like his mother had one day found life unbearable and had unlike her been successful in divorcing himself from it.  And then three years later he was driving home in the shrouded morning from a friend’s house, driving stoned along a back road altared with trees, under a sky swelling faintly with light like water, and had crashed his car into a drainage ditch.  It was Julian’s car, actually. This was before the Connecticut police did blood tests for THC.  He had broken his leg in the accident, severing several crucial nerves in the process, but what he remembers most clearly is the moment he went off the blacktop.  He was driving too fast, and for three seconds he was in the air.  It had seemed like longer.  In that interminable time the world had come into shattering relief.  The grey dawn light against the silver leaves had glowed and crackled with a strange and galactic fire and the shawled dark branches had woven themselves together in what seemed to him like some final, some apocalyptic constellation, epiphany writ large, always there but until then unperceived.  It was May, his windows were open, and he had felt the air midflight curve around him like a womb.  He had dragged himself out of the contorted remains of what had once been a respectable enough secondhand Jeep (You little fuck, Julian had said later, you turned my car into something out of a science fiction novel) lay panting on the grass, unable to feel his leg below his knee, and understood that his father had gone over that cliff and had like himself been mesmerized by the sheer clarity of sight, by the borders between things, that dimensions had shown themselves and he had died in love with  them.
         Owen’s done eating and puts his plate aside.  Marcia does the same and stretches out on the sand with her head in his lap.  He leans back on his locked elbows and tilts his face up to the sun, imagines Cortes landing here in the ships the Cempoaltecas had described as floating mountains.  Marcia’s eyes are closed.  She says dreamily: "La Malinche.  It sounds like the name of a wind.  A soft south wind."
         He says: "It’s the name of a volcano outside Mexico City."  The Mexicans hate her. A malinchista is a traitor, a lover of foreigners.  She had lived with Cortes in a house in the remains of Tenochtitlan that survives today without a plaque.  His friend Augustín, who teaches political philosophy at the Universidad, had pointed it out to him one day, as they were walking along the calle Higuera.  La Malinche lived there, he had said.  And Cortes.  That is the house where he strangled his wife.  The Spanish wife.  To Augustín, La Malinche is a traitor.  She sold her people for his embrace.  But Owen cannot hate her.  Once gone so far, so many cities destroyed, walls crumbled, families shattered, there could be no going back.  Hatred, he thinks, is passed down through the generations.  He imagines her living there on the calle Higuera, trapped between a violent lover and the anguish of her people. There would have been no friends to visit her, only a stream of obsequious Spaniards whose words rolled down like lava, whose gestures were as stylized as those of the ritual dance on which they had released the full avalanche of their greed, and then perhaps her parents would have come, once or twice, moving slowly among the delicate upholstered furniture, uncertain, torn between love and pain.  Love and pain being what she had chosen that day in Veracruz when she agreed to go with the strange men from across the sea, not knowing then that the first is transient, the second, immortal.

-- Carlynn Houghton

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