Maria, who tended to have the distracted nature of the poet, upon arriving at the great abandoned ruins described them in her journal like this: “It was as if the Great Cosmic Mother had tossed her broken pottery to the ground.” But then, more reflective than sad, she went on, “No, it was not the rage of the Goddess that caused this disastrous doom … but man’s own shortcomings in dealing with his home, the Earth.” Then she added in Spanish because she liked to mix a little Spanish into her writing, even though it made her nervous since she didn’t speak it too well: “su Madre.”

On the other hand, Helena, less philosophical, or perhaps just not as poetic as her parna, simply had let out a loud whistle at the impressive sight and uttered, “Cool.”

At the time of this excursion, the two women were no longer in love.

At least not as they had been once—like the summer they traveled down to southern Mexico and Guatemala to see the Mayan ruins and that unforgettable year when they worked and worked and saved and saved so that they could spend the summer in Athens with Helena’s grandparents. No, not in love like when one got a thought and the other got it too at that same unspoken moment, both having merged in mind and dress so that sometimes neither friends nor family could tell one from the other no more. But what had really happened, unfortunately, as ideal as it started out to be, was not that they had succeeded in becoming one, but that they had become neither.

On the positive side, there remained between them sincere affection and general concern if not burning love, so they made the best of their intense and isolated journey together, just as a pair of astronauts must do, having been launched into outer space knowing that the person next to her, however much a stranger, is really the only other human being that exists.

So they forged ahead—sometimes talking up a storm and laughing like old times and sometimes in brooding silence, each wondering what was to become of her once she got back home—stopping in villages and cities, occasionally picking up a souvenir, like a heart-shaped stone polished by the shallow waters of the Rio Grande for a favorite nephew, or a pair of silver-and-lapis-lazuli earrings in the shape of the “Story Teller” for a comadre or a necklace of coral and shell or animal-shaped fetishes for herself.

Their destination point was the village where Maria’s ancestors had been buried for the last nine generations—until her father had left New Mexico to try his luck in California, where indeed, he had done well with a string of taquerías in East L.A. Her father had been successful because he had the collateral, but it had been her Mexican mother’s taco know-how that was the key to the business’s popularity.