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.

Mara 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. Mara was thirty-four, with auburn hair pinned up out of the way and green eyes that had spent eight years at that bench, and Mara 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 Mara 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. Mara 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 Mara put the Huastec woman away in her drawer, washed her hands, and switched off the lamp.