"Why did you walk away, Coatlicue? What summoned you to Teotihaucan, seat of the nameless old ones? What terrible, shattering fate befell you there?"
Question after question, but no answer.
It happened one day two years after Lujan had given up questioning his Mother Goddess, and the terrible memories were dimming just as the memories of the great earthquake had faded somewhat. Rodrigo Lujan was explaining to a visiting Yale professor of ethnology the significance of Coatlicue.
"She is our Mother Goddess, our Mexican earth mother."
"She looks ferocious."
"Yes, she is terrible to behold, but all the gods of old Mexico were terrible. That was their beauty. There is beauty in terror and terror in beauty."
"Tell me," said the visiting professor, "I understood she had been shattered by a fall or something. But I see no signs of trauma."
"This was erroneously reported in the newspapers. As you can see, Our Mother is whole and undamaged."
There ensued some small talk, and the visiting professor moved on to feast his unworshipful eyes upon the other treasures of the museum.
Gringos, Lujan thought. They came. They gawked. They moved on. But they never understood the allure of brutality. When the last gringo lay under the soil, Coatlicue would endure, just as she had endured the remorseless centuries.
Gringos did not matter. Just as long as there were Zapotecs to worship her. That was all that mattered to Rodrigo Lujan.
He was startled only a few hours later on that long-ago evening when, as the museum was closing and he was paying his nightly respects to the Mother Goddess, Coatliacue spoke to him in the slow language of the gringos, English.
"Survive. . ."
The voice was an agony of elongated syllables.
"What?"
"Survival..."
"Yes. Survival. I understand your speech, Coatlicue. What are you trying to tell me?"
Her words were like broken stones knocking together. "I. . . must.. survive."
"More. You must endure. You will endure. Long after I am dust and bones, you will endure, for you are the mother of all indios."
"Help... me... to...survive."
"How?"
"Protect... me...."
"You are in the most protected building in all of Mexico, save for the Presidential Palace," Lujan reassured his goddess.
"My enemies must never find me."
"Nor will they. We will confound them at every turn, for are we not Zapotec?"
"Meaning unclear. Clarify."
Lujan frowned. "Why do you speak the language of the gringos?"
"English is the language l am programmed to understand."
"This is most passing strange. Tell me, Coatlicue, I implore you. Why did you desert this fine museum so long ago?"
"To defeat my enemies."
"And they are now vanquished?"
"No. I was nearly vanquished. Even now my systems have not fully repaired themselves. So I have altered my survival plait."
The words were coming more fluidly now, as from an engine shaking off years of disuse.
"Yes?" Lujan prompted.
"It is not necessary to destroy the meat machines in order to survive. I am a machine of metal and other nonliving matter. I will not die unless destroyed. All meat machines die when their organic systems fail or wear out. I will outlast the meat machines, who are programmed for obsolescence."
"Who-what are these things you call meat machines?"
"Men are meat machines."
"Women, too?"
"All biological organisms are machines. They are self-propelled constructs of flesh and bone and other organic matter, yet they are only machines of a biological kind. I am a machine of a more enduring kind. I will survive by surviving. When they have all died, l will be free to leave this prison."
"This is not a prison. This is your home, your temple, your redoubt. Under this site lies the crushed rubble of Tenochtitlan, the old Aztec capital. Do you not remember?"
"I will abide here in this place until the optimum conditions for my continued survival have been achieved. Then I will leave. You must protect me until then."
"I will do this. Whatever you want. Just name these things. And I will lay them at your feet."
"I need nothing from you, meat machine. I am self-sustaining. I have no desires. I can exist in this present assimilated form for as long as necessary."
"I promise you that I will watch over you to the end of my days, and after that my sons will take up where I leave off and their sons after them and on and on until the day comes where Mexicans-the true Mexicans-again control their own destinies."
"It is an agreement."
And so it was done. After that, Coatlicue spoke little other than to inquire about conditions in the world outside the museum. She rejoiced in every tragedy. Famines and catastrophes in which there were large losses of human life particularly interested her. It was very Aztec.
For his part, Rodrigo Lujan saw that she was not moved or harmed and every night he beseeched her unheeding ears with whispered entreaties to restrain the earth from another upheaval.
Sometimes he would burn copal incense in a jade cup and lay songbirds at her feet, which he would pierce with a stingray spine, delicately excising the still-beating heart and laying it on a rude basalt altar taken from a glass case.
These sacrifices neither offended nor propitiated Coatlicue, so Lujan dutifully continued them.