For the last time we climbed the tall pyramid, El Castillo. “We don’t have to go on, you know,” I told Mrs. Brown, halfway up. The day was so bright and hot it almost tasted of gunpowder, and she had left her hat in the car, where Jesús was now napping. She paused on the stone step, shading her eyes with one flat hand, her hair blowing back like the mermaid on the prow of a ship. She had removed her gloves to use both hands for the climb, the steps were that monstrous. “Of course we do,” she said, sighing deeply as if to say, “Men do this.” And that is a fact, men do, unable to resist the same impulse that built the thing in the first place: senseless ambition.

But the view from the top, we convinced ourselves, was worth the pain. We sat on a ledge looking down on the tourists in the plaza, pitying those little ants because they were not up here, and if they ever meant to be, they would have to pay the price. And there is the full sum of it, senseless ambition reduced to its rudiments. Civilizations are built on that, and a water hole.

“Imagine the place crawling with slaves and kings,” I said.

“Ten thousand slaves to every one king, I’d imagine.”

And barking dogs. And mothers, wondering if their children have fallen down the well. We stayed a good while, reconstructing the scene. She was curious about how a writer decides where to begin the story. You start with “In the beginning,” I told her, but it should be as close to the end as possible. There’s the trick.

“How can you know?”

“You just decide. It could be right here. In the first light of dawn, the king in maroon robes and a golden breastplate stood atop his temple, glowering down at the chaos. He understood with dismay that his empire was collapsing. You have to get right into the action, readers are impatient. If you dilly-dally, they’ll go turn on the radio and listen to Duffy’s Tavern instead, because it’s all wrapped up in an hour.”

“How could the king know his empire is about to collapse?”

“Because everything’s in a mess.”

“Fiddlesticks,” she said. “Everything’s always a mess, but people say ‘Buck up, we just have to get through this one bad patch.’”

“True enough. But you and I know it was, because we’ve read about it. Chichén Itzá was the center of a vast and powerful empire, art and architecture that flourished for centuries. And then around 900 after Christ, it mysteriously vanished.”

“People don’t vanish,” she said. “Hitler took his life, but Germany is still there. Just for example. People going to work and having their birthdays and what all.”

True enough, and the Mayans who now people this forest surely do not think of themselves as a failed culture. They build their huts of ancient design, make gardens, and sing children to sleep. Rulers and generals change without their notice. In the time since Cortés, the great Spanish empire has collapsed into one small landmass of rock and vineyards, the little right paw of Europe. Its far-flung provinces have been lost, the million shackled subjugates set free. Spain outlawed slavery, built schools and hospitals, and its poets, come to think of it, are practically in a contest now to condemn the Spanish history of conquest. Did Cortés see all that roaring toward him like a steam locomotive? Did England or France? All this earnest forward motion, the marches to the mountain, the murals and outstretched hands: which part of it do we ever call failure?

“A novel needs a good collapse,” I maintained. “Success and failure. People read books to escape the uncertainties of life. And they build pyramids to last forever, so we can have something to climb on top of and admire.”

“You know best,” she said. “But there’s no use admiring a thing just because it lasted. My brother once had a boil on his bottom a whole year, and it was nothing you’d want to see in the photogravure.”

“Violet Brown, the poet.”

She laughed.

“I’ll remind you of that boil, next time you try to stop me from burning old notebooks and letters.”

She didn’t like that. She pulled her thin cotton gloves from under her belt where she’d tucked them. Put them on, smoothed ruffled feathers. “Some things are worth remembering, and some are not. That’s all I meant.”

“And you can say which is which?”

“No, I can’t. But piling rocks on top of rocks might not be the ticket. Maybe we should admire people the most for living in this jungle without leaving one mark on it.”

“But how would we know about them a thousand years later?”

“In a thousand years, Mr. Shepherd, the cow can jump over the moon.”

That was the end of it, because a rising storm cloud began to turn the day a menacing color, driving us down from our aerie. The heavens let loose as we reached the ground. Children who’d been hawking woodcarvings and embroidery now disappeared into the forest for shelter, while the tourists hurried back to their autos. Behind us the temples stood in the strange yellow light with rain darkening their stone pates, dissolving their limestone one particle at a time, carrying off the day’s measure of history.

PART 5

Asheville, North Carolina

1948–1950
(VB)

Star Week, February 1, 1948

Southern Star Shines on Shepherd Romance

Young men in the Land of Sky seem to prefer the taste of old wine. A decade ago in Ashville, North Carolina, young writer Thomas Wolfe rocketed to fame, fleeing Southern scandal for Manhattan’s forgiving bohemian scene and the arms of a lady seventeen years his senior. The writer’s family tried to squelch the match with comely theater designer Aline Bernstein—that’s Mrs. Bernstein—and so did Mr. Bernstein, we’re guessing. But Wolfe carried the torch to an early grave.

Now Harrison Shepherd is out to prove history repeats. This Ashville writer rode his pen to the heights with Vassals of Majesty and last year’s Pilgrims of Chaltepec, ringing up more sales than Wolfe saw in a lifetime. Thanks to secretive habits and a well-known scorn for press correspondents, Shepherd has nudged over Wolfe as the talk of his town. In a new move plainly inspired by his tutor, Shepherd has now linked up with a lady exactly seventeen years his senior. Married? At least once, say our sources.

Little else is known about the mysterious Violet Brown, but the trim brunette must have some powerful lure for snaring this diffident bachelor and his piles of cash. You could hear the hearts crack on both sides of the Mason-Dixon last month as the couple took a pre-honeymoon tour through Mexico, Shepherd’s boyhood home, where his family still resides.