The Labyrinth of Love

Chapter One Looking back on everything, I think Maria changed my life more than I changed hers. I was an aging gringo with diminished prospects, and she was a young Mexican woman, unsure, but glorious, in the morning of her beauty. If it hadn’t been for the art students from Mexico City, I might never have met her. It was the vernal equinox of 1990, and I was in the Yucatan taking photographs for a New York magazine. Spring arrived at twenty-six minutes after five in the afternoon that year. I know because I was a witness, a conspicuous gringo in my Boston Red Sox baseball cap and black jeans, standing among forty thousand awestruck spectators. Women held up umbrellas for protection against the glare of the lowering sun. Others—men and women of all ages—fell upon their knees. Arms and hands were raised in supplication. With my trusty Leica M-6 on the tripod, I recorded the path of an undulating ray of sunlight as it slithered down a staircase on the shadowed side of a grand pyramid. A collective gasp rose up from the plaza when the ray illuminated the limestone snake’s head at the bottom. It was a manifestation of the god I had come to know as Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent. He descended from the heavens to assure those who gathered that their debt of blood had been paid for another year and that the parched land would bloom once again under the falling grace of rain.