A cool breeze whistled past our ankles, causing the tin roof to tremble. A storm was rising in the distance, but this cool air seemed to come from beneath the ground. The professor said in fact, it did. The place has lava tubes, long caves where the molten earth once ran as rivers. The ground beneath the whole ancient city is laced with them.
“Tunnels, you mean? Like the water caves out on the coast?”
He said it’s different rock but a similar formation. The ancients were directed by their gods to look for a doorway from the earth, and here they found them.
The professor talked and talked without releasing Frida’s elbow. She shot a few trapped glances before the final escape, a quick getaway down the Avenue of the Dead while Gamio was distracted by a student volunteer. To avoid the dazzling heat, Frida suggested leaving the ancient stone pavement and climbing down the bank of the little San Juan River. It was nearly dry, a trickle in the bottom of a grassy ravine. She flung out a tablecloth in a grove of old pepper trees with gnarled trunks and birds singing from their drooping fernlike boughs. She collapsed on the ground, panting, “Help, we’re saved! I thought I would be a human sacrifice. Bored to death by Theories of Antiquity.” Then set about unpacking the heavy picknick basket she’d brought from home.
“Why do you think they made necklaces like that, of human mandibles?”
She fingered her own necklace, huge jade stones, a wedding present from Diego.
“Fashion,” she said. “Diego showed me pictures of that before. Most of the people weren’t important enough to collect real human teeth, you know, the regular low-class citizens. So they made fake ones, flint teeth stuck into clay jawbones.” She pulled a bottle of wine from the basket and uncorked it, pouring it into two good crystal glasses that probably shouldn’t have risked the journey. But that is Frida, using her best, the devil can take the shards.
“Isn’t it awfully sad to think that’s all history amounts to, just following the next stupid fashion?”
“Fashion isn’t stupid,” she said, handing over a glass, spilling a dark red splash on the knee of her overall.
“It’s worse than stupid. There’s damage in it. Mother lived and died in dread of wearing last year’s frock. And look at what Lev loses, every time the newspapers jump in line to call him a villain. When one says it they all have to say it, for fear of being left behind. It’s all the same thing more or less. Following fashion.”
“Fashion is not the same as idiocy.”
She produced an impressive meal from her basket: pork tamales in banana leaves, stuffed chayotes, prickly pear fruits fried in batter.
“Don’t tell your professor boyfriend, but I agree with you about the pyramid copying the shape of the mountain. It’s a joke. They were just people. We come here to be dazzled by sculptures of giant snakes, imagining the ancients labored for us, so we will remember them for all time. But maybe they just liked the look of snakes.”
“When did you have this big revelation?”
“Today.”
“I told you, every Mexican has to come here.”
“Look, Frida. I’m going to tell you something, and it doesn’t even matter if you make fun of me. Ever since I was fourteen and read Cortés, I’ve been writing a story about the Azteca. Mostly in my head, but a lot is on paper. And now I can see I’ve had the story wrong, all this time. I’ve spent years writing something really stupid.”
She nodded, biting into a tamale. “Tell me in what way it’s stupid.”
“My impression was from books. The ancients seemed to be…what the professor said. Locked in the struggle for greatness. Heroes and battles, mythic kings.”
“Well, nobody knows how they were, so you can make up anything you want.” She pawed through the basket for napkins. She brought the blue-and-yellow ones. “A story is like a painting, Sóli. It doesn’t have to look like what you see out the window.”
“Well, the ancients might not have been very heroic. Most of them were probably like Mother, crouched somewhere trying to work out how to make fake jawbone jewelry that would look like the real thing.”
“That’s a better story, to tell you the truth,” she said. “Greatness is very boring.”
The prickly pear fruit was delicious: thick slices, lightly fried with sugar and anise. “Did you cook all this today, this morning?”
“Montserrat, at the San Angel Inn,” she said with her mouth full. She chewed thoughtfully. “I mean it. Your idea for the story sounds good.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter because I can’t be a writer.”
“Dumb kid, you are a writer. Cesár tried to get you fired for always writing in your notebooks, and Diego tried to make you stop, too. It killed me to see him try. Now these men want to make you an efficient secretary. But you keep writing about soft hearts and scandal. The question is, why do you think you can’t be a writer?”
“To be a writer, you need readers.”
“I’m no painter, then. Who ever looks at my dumb little pieces of shit?”
“An American movie star, to name one. Diego told me that fellow looked at all your paintings and bought a couple.”
She was pouring more wine but glanced up, under her dark brows. “Edward G. Robinson. He bought four of them, if you want to know. Two hundred dollars each.”
“Dios mio. You see?”
“I see nothing. I see a boy who chews off the ends of his fingers and bleeds ink.”
“A dumb kid, is what you said.”
“Let’s get back to the topic of your story. What do you think people want, if it’s not greatness and to be remembered for all time?”
There was hardly anything left of that huge lunch but greasy fingers and a crackle of anise between the teeth. The wine bottle was empty. “Mostly? I believe people want to eat a good lunch, and then take a good piss.”
She was digging in that basket again, and unbelievably, produced another half-bottle of wine, recorked from some previous adventure. “And love, Sóli, don’t forget that. We are bodies, sometimes with dreams and always with desires.”
“Love. But the pure kind of love, what Lev has for humanity, I don’t think that comes very often. Most of us are ordinary. If we do anything great, it’s only so we’ll be loved ourselves. Maybe just for ten minutes.”