The Long Count

On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, 1985, the conservation laboratory of the Museo Nacional de Antigüedades Mesoamericanas smelled, as it always did, of acetone, damp stone and coffee gone cold; and, faintly, through the tall barred windows of what had once been the refectory of the Colegio de San Eligio, of the city outside: diesel, roasting corn, and somewhere close by, a pot of ponche steaming with guava and cinnamon and sugar cane.

Elias sat at the long bench under the north window with a Huastec clay figure on a padded board, a woman with a conical cap and her hands on her knees, and a swab on a bamboo stick, and worked very slowly along a crack in the figure's shoulder that the earthquake had opened in September. The crack was no wider than a hair. Under the magnifying lamp it looked like a canyon. Elias was thirty-four, with black hair pinned up out of the way and hazel eyes that had spent eight years at that bench, and Elias liked this kind of work better than any other: the kind where nothing happened for a long time, and then a little, and nothing could be hurried.

Outside, the city was trying to have Christmas.

Three months after the earthquake it was still not the same city. On the walk to work that morning Elias had passed, as every morning, the gaps: places in the street wall where a building had stood on the eighteenth of September and on the twentieth had not, now fenced with corrugated tin and hung with paper flowers and photographs and the names of the people who had been inside. There were tents in the parks still. There were buildings held up by timber shores like old men on crutches, and buildings with the fronts gone, showing wallpaper and a mirror and a calendar on the fourth floor. And there were posadas anyway, every night since the sixteenth: the procession with candles through the courtyards, the old song asking for shelter at the door, the piñatas in the shape of stars. On every block the children had them. On the corner by the museum a man sold piñatas from a pole, bright as birds, and had marked his prices up three times since November, because the peso was falling again, the way it had fallen in '82, and nobody's wages were keeping up with anything.

The museum had closed at two. The galleries were empty. The staff had gone home to their families, to the cena, the turkey or the bacalao or the romeritos, to Misa de Gallo at midnight, to the long night. Elias had worked here for eight years, since leaving the conservation school at Churubusco, and knew the building the way you know a person: its tempers, its cold corners, which stairs creaked and which windows stuck in the rains, the way the light came into the Sala Maya through the high windows at four in the afternoon and turned the stone faces gold. In September it had shaken like a dog shaking off water, and stood. Not everything in it had.

The building was nearly silent: the creak of the timber shores in the cracked north wing, the pigeons, and far away in the guard room a radio playing Christmas songs.

At a quarter to six Elias put the Huastec woman away in her drawer, washed his hands, and switched off the lamp.

Elias stopped at the guard room by the staff door, a narrow whitewashed room with a key cabinet on the wall and a kerosene heater and a Virgin of Guadalupe in a frame with plastic roses.

Don Faustino Ríos was coming on for the night, buttoning his gray uniform jacket over a belly that had grown in thirty years of night shifts, and young Rubén was already there, unpacking a cloth bundle of tamales his mother had sent. "For the night," Don Faustino said, "since we are two, this year, instead of six. The licenciado says there is no money." He shrugged, as at weather. "But we have tamales. Feliz Nochebuena, Elias. Go home. Eat. Sleep. The old ones are safe with us."

"I know," Elias said, and meant it, and went out into the cold blue evening with the smell of the tamales following.

The mask in the case was a fake.

Elias had known it since the eighth of October. After the earthquake every object that had been moved, dropped or evacuated had come to the lab for a condition report, and the Ox Muyal mask had been all three: shaken off its plinth in the first terrible minute of the nineteenth of September, lifted out that night by flashlight with the rest of the Sala Maya, and carried down in a numbered box to the lab, where Elias, among a hundred other objects that night, had signed for it. Nothing seemed broken. It had gone back on display on the twenty-sixth.

In October, with time at last, Elias had examined it properly.

The stone was green stone, and good. But the backing it was set into was not lime stucco over wood, as the 1962 report said; it was a modern plaster, bound with a synthetic resin that went cloudy under a drop of acetone. Along the edges of three tesserae there were fine straight parallel scratches that only a powered saw could make. And on the rim of the right ear flare, where the registry card and the 1962 photographs showed an old chip, a little bite out of the jade the size of a lentil, there was nothing. The rim was perfect.

Elias had written it up, carefully, in a confidential report of eleven pages with photographs, and on the fourth of November had put it in the director's own hands.

Dr. Zamudio had read it at his desk, twice, with his reading glasses on and his face going slowly gray. Then he had folded it, and put it in his inside pocket, and looked up.

"Leave it with me," he had said. "I will handle it. Properly, quietly, through the right people. And until I tell you otherwise, not one word. To anyone. Not to your family, not to your colleagues. You understand why." Elias had understood. Three months after the earthquake, with the country bankrupt and the city in ruins, the newspapers would make a feast of it: the nation's treasure, a fake. "Leave it with me," he had said again.

So the fake had gone back on its plinth, and Elias had left it with him. For seven weeks.

Twice in those weeks Elias had asked. Once in the corridor outside the director's office in late November, and he had taken Elias's arm and walked a few steps and said, very low, that the matter was in hand, that there were inquiries that could not be hurried, and that Elias must trust him. And once at the beginning of December, when he had only looked at Elias over his glasses, tiredly, as at a child who asks again whether it is Christmas yet, and said: "Patience." Elias had gone back to the lab and the Huastec woman and the hundred other broken things the earthquake had left, and had been patient, and had walked past the case every evening, and every evening the false face had looked out through the glass, calm and green and lovely, at the schoolchildren and the tourists and the guards, and lied to all of them.

And somewhere, all that time, there was a real one.

Elias ate the cena at his mother's table in Coyoacán that night, with aunts and cousins and the bacalao and the midnight church bells, and slept badly on the old sofa, and at twenty to seven on Christmas morning the telephone in the hall rang and went on ringing.

"¿Bueno?"

It was the director, and his voice was not his own.

"The mask," he said. "Someone has taken the mask."