She gloried in the sensuality of it, gloried in the perfection of her body.

Bill Joseph Markowski She stripped naked and bathed in the water running through the old place. It felt good to be out there all alone in the terrific heat, the blazing sun further darkening her dark skin. She was coming to love her Indian identity more and more every day and the idea of it, the idea of being an Indian continuously, progressively becoming easier to her. The problem was not her, it was them, the easterners who looked askance at her dark skin, the dark skin of the Aztecs, the Incas, the great pyramid builders, the people who built beautiful stone structures when the ancestors of the whites who looked down their noses at her were living in mud huts, defecating on the ground.
She reached down and scooped water with a broken pottery shard, a shard that had been formed perhaps a thousand years ago, poured water down onto her raven hair, over her face, breasts, belly, pudenda. She gloried in the sensuality of it, gloried in the perfection of her body. She was beautiful, inside and out and she was now just beginning to understand it. She was beginning to love herself and she wished Del Calle was with her. Perhaps one day she’d bring him here and they’d walk naked together all around the place, play and love and live and walk about as the original inhabitants had done so long ago. The Mule Tamer III, Marta's Quest