Eight

THE LEDGER had accumulated many Vicentes—two in my handwriting. I didn’t know who they were; I didn’t know who anyone was. The names I would read aloud on Sunday were only names. The slips of paper in Xinia’s hand seemed to fall in a flurry before me; the expressionless faces of their bearers had already become blurred in my mind so that they appeared less as the agglomeration of a hundred people than the hard, anonymous substance of their core, which while pushing me away as a stranger began also to erode the details that made me the particular stranger that I was. I felt the danger of losing, in the effort to understand their inscrutable and nameless commonality, the qualities that allowed me to see it as something I lacked. I would drift, and become lost, and when I reached the center of their mystery I would arrive as a blank page, with a hundred dimly recognizable names written upon me.

After returning from Estrada’s I’d spent an hour leafing through the ledger, and I had no better sense of what his words meant. The next time someone arrived for confession I would be as much at a loss as I’d been before. Then I remembered, with a flash of surprise, a passage from Eric Thompson’s Rise and Fall of Maya Civilization that spoke of the priesthood in relation to sickness. I found Thompson’s book and flipped through it until I found the right page. The passage was just as I’d remembered it.

 

An important duty of all members of the priesthood was divination. . . . Forms of divination . . . survive to this day as part of the training of village shamans or calendar priests. These are used principally for ascertaining such matters as the causes of sickness or the names of those who have caused it by black magic, the location of lost articles, whether a sick person will recover, or whether a girl will make a good wife. . . .

The treatment of sickness was an important part of a priest’s duties, the first task being to divine the cause of the sickness, often found to have been “sent” by an enemy or to have been caused by “evil winds” or failure to make the required sacrifice and prayers to the gods or to carry out some ritual correctly.

 

I saw in Thompson’s description a series of implications that I hadn’t considered before. When I read his words in Río Roto I finally understood the connection between illness and the priesthood that I should have understood, from personal experience, years earlier. As I reread Thompson’s passage I recalled my last month of college, when I’d been sick with vertigo. To most people vertigo means a faintness brought on by the fear of heights, but it also manifests itself as an imbalance of the inner ear causing dizziness, disorientation, and nausea. In my case it was accompanied by fever. I’d at first dismissed the symptoms, thinking they were due to lack of sleep. For days, I would open my eyes in the morning after lying sleepless all night and my head would spin so that I had difficulty sitting up. I would reach for the clock and my hand would land on the pillow. The extreme disorientation worsened when I stood up or made a movement of any kind. The only relief came from lying, sitting, or standing perfectly still.

I was taking medication to little effect, and it was your suggestion that I see Marie. I barely remembered her, but you and Mamá had only good things to say about the time you’d spent with her in California, and from her position as chaplain at my college she’d kept a friendly eye on me over the years. Not until I was sick with vertigo did I take up her long-standing invitation to stop by. I sat in her office, waiting for her and admiring how the room was more like a living room than a study. There were armchairs and a pile carpet; she’d laid out things for tea on a long coffee table. The sun came in through the windows behind her desk and the beams of light, descending vertiginously to the floor, caused my stomach to lurch violently. Just then Marie walked in, smiling, a kettle full of hot water in her hand.

“Don’t worry if you need to just rest your head back and close your eyes,” she said. “I know you’re not ignoring me.”

Though her voice was oddly sharp, even sour, there was no mistaking the gentleness behind it. She walked over to the window with the kettle still in her hand and lowered the blind, then turned back toward the room. Remembering the kettle, she set it down on the rug and muttered something about a potholder. She went off in search of it, tucking her graying hair back into her hairpins as she walked around the room. Marie seemed to have all the time in the world. Her slow, somewhat absentminded movements immediately calmed me and I felt easier than I had for weeks. “Thank you for seeing me,” I said.

“I’m delighted to see you,” she said. She filled the teapot with boiling water and set the kettle aside on the potholder. “What a rough month it’s been for you.”

I nodded and my stomach lurched again. I closed my eyes.

Marie made a sympathetic noise. “I can’t imagine what you’ve been through. But you’re getting the degree; that’s good. They would have to have hearts of stone to expel you at this point.”

She had a way of speaking that was so unembarrassed and matter-of-fact that I couldn’t feel ashamed. I realized, as we went on talking, that she was able to speak this way because she believed me implicitly. Unlike the professor who’d first called me into his office to point out the plagiarism or the administrators who’d interrogated me endlessly, Marie assumed that I was in the right before I’d even explained myself to her. It astounded me. I found myself describing to her what had happened with perfect honesty and none of the confusion that had made things so difficult with the administrators.

“I think,” I said to Marie, “part of me really believed that what I was writing could be true of my parents. Since they never told me anything, I always made it up. And when I read about other people coming to the U.S., I guess I filled in the blanks. And then I just wrote that way.”

Marie nodded. “Of course. That makes perfect sense.”

I looked at her, feeling fully the injustice of it. “Some of those books I don’t even remember reading.”

“Cryptomnesia,” Marie said. “I’ve read about it.”

“It’s like they were gone from my head, but then they came out when I was writing.”

“Isn’t that amazing?” Marie looked at me in wonder, as if marveling at some ingenious feat accomplished by my brain. “I’m surprised anyone even picked it up. It must be unusual in creative writing.”

I sighed. “Actually the professor said I was the fourth case this year. But the only one in the senior creative-writing seminar.”

Marie knew precisely what I was thinking. “But you’re not like them. It’s totally different when it’s unintentional.”

I realized then that these were the words I’d been waiting to hear for an entire month. I felt suddenly, immeasurably relieved. “I won’t get the double major—just history. And all my recommendations for grad school have been withdrawn.” But even as I said it the thought of it no longer bothered me as much.

Marie made a face. “So you’ll miss grad school. Poor you.”

The vertigo lasted for another two weeks, and in other ways, of course, the underlying condition never completely disappeared. But the most extreme symptoms began to dissipate after the visit with Marie. At the time I saw no connection between the two things; only in Río Roto did they appear to me in an altogether different light. Still, I knew that I didn’t have the skill for either the kind of divination described by Thompson or the kind practiced by Marie.

Furthermore, there was the suggestion in what Thompson had written that illnesses could be brought about not only by internal anxieties but by external causes—by an “enemy,” as he put it. His words suggested that another explanation might better account for what Estrada had told me. I searched for the part in Murdo MacLeod’s Spanish Central America that explained how such external provocations occurred. It required no modern medical knowledge to believe, as people had for centuries, that illnesses could be inflicted by peoples upon each other. Diseases are not always neutral, their carriers blameless. The organism itself might be, but the one who spread it to others, particularly in a state of immunity, could be considered to bring the disease upon a people as an act of war. I’d once read that in the Brazilian jungle, anthropologists and explorers had provoked among the Yanomami of the twentieth century something similar to what the Spanish had created centuries earlier in Mesoamerica: unintentional, perhaps, but nonetheless responsible. MacLeod’s description in Spanish Central America is unclear in its use of “holocaust,” though as I read it I presumed, insofar as he considered the epidemic genocidal, that he also considered it culpable. On the other hand, his treatment of guilt is complicated, and it’s difficult to say where he lays the principal blame or whether he thinks of blame at all. He describes the smallpox and plague brought by the Spaniards to Guatemala as the “shock troops of the conquest,” forces that devastated the population before any armed battles began.

 

Indian accounts of these first epidemics in Michoacán and Guatemala are quite explicit. Such diseases had not been known in the region before; the death rate was catastrophic, and demoralization and illness were so widespread that the piles of dead were left untended and unburied for the vultures. Native sources in Yucatán, where a similar epidemic struck, called this time of sickness “oc-na-kuch-il” which is to say “when the zopilotes come into the houses,” that is, when the dead lie about everywhere untended. . . . Given present day knowledge of the impact of smallpox or plague on people without previous immunities, it is safe, indeed conservative, to say that a third of the Guatemalan highland population died during this holocaust.

 

It was an entirely different matter, I decided, putting the books back on the shelf, if the illnesses confessed to me pointed to the marching progress of troops I was unaware of.