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while she looked up at the sky and tried to find whales, faces, animals in the hurrying clouds.
    You took Franz by the hand and moved up the path that leads to the ancient Toltecan ceremonial center. Goats, their accustomed peace violated, jumped away with their hooves sounding like stone against stone. The path was rocky and on both sides were thorn bushes and dwarf ferns. You climbed quickly and reached the esplanade. Franz spread his arms. You, also smiling, were about to say that you were glad not to remember that visit here last year, it made this like the first time, the original surprise and pleasure, but Franz spoke first: “I had forgotten.”
    From the air Xochicalco must look like a sand castle after the tide has washed and smoothed it: it is pure form lacking all detail. The terraces rise with a capricious symmetry until the topmost culminates in the great main temple, alone in the center of its plaza but accompanied, distantly, by the broken columns of the roofless palace that hangs over the straight drop down to the lowest of the terraces, the ancient ball court with its blackened rings.
    Franz rested both hands on your shoulders. You moved away from him, passing Javier and Isabel, who had just reached the esplanade, and ran to the bas-relief that winds around the four sides of the base of the pyramid. That relief is a single serpent, a circle of serpents without beginning or end, a feathered serpent in flight, with many heads, many fanged gullets. You stopped and touched the gush of stone and then walked on around the pyramid. Out of sight, you stopped and touched it again, leaned forward with your arms resting upon the endless serpent whose contractions and prolongations seem provoked by the other figures in the relief, the men, animals, birds, and trees that are all contained within those twisting convolutions: seated Toltecan dignitaries wearing sumptuous ornaments, necklaces, and elaborate high headdresses; chopped-off trunks of cottonwoods; glyphs of human speech; jaguars, rabbits, crumbling eagles. You placed your face against one of the heads of the serpent and for a moment shared its profile, and I know the temptation you felt. You were thinking that this was how you would like to be swallowed up, to lose your will in this circle of violence, your identity in becoming the slave of a strength that resembled your own; that this was almost what you had always been searching for; that you would like to remain forever here in this house of prayer, this place of sacred rites, once more this beth hatefillah. Your hands caressed the ancient stone, the light and shadow made solid that had survived centuries and that you could believe contained the secret core of Mexico, the grain of that authentic being which is hidden behind our poverty and ostentation, our pride, wretchedness, cruelty, mediocrity. Here, you were thinking, was the occult greatness of this land: its eroded sun, its lost ray of moonlight. Okay, Dragoness, okay, we dig that you have read your D. H. Lawrence loud and clear. So there you were, leaning against the old granite snake and wanting to remain there in spirit although to the eye you would leave it and return to the Volkswagen and sit beside blond Franz and in front of graying Javier and young Isabel and resume speech, laughter, malice, love, despair, hope, while you waited, waited, hoped for the sea that you would not reach until tomorrow. You were tempted, Elizabeth. Oh, yes, you were tempted. To become the prisoner of the serpent’s rings, to be drowned in the flood of its crumbling feathers, to live with your eyes squinted tight shut once again and your hands crossed and motionless while you exulted in the might of passivity, the power of surrender, deciding nothing, not even not to decide, doing nothing, never putting your will to the most minor of tests, surviving entirely by abstention, once again in your juiverie, your vicus Judaeorum, your carriera, your Judengasse, your