Hunger's Brides Read online

How I wanted to let Panoayan go now. Place of thorns, this El Dorado of loss—of pasts and precious jades, of tongues and riddles and friends. Josefa and María were right: these mountains were oppressive—suffocating. They might be the Heart of the Earth, a place of women’s secrets, but that heart was cold now, and still. Or so I wanted mine to be in me. I was on my way to the city of Mexico, seat of empires. This was to be my life. I must make myself hard as iron and full of briars.

  At the eastern shore the late sun loured on the lake with a light dulled to pewter. In the shallows, mats of flotsam heaved in a dance of woodblocks, reeds and corn husks. Up and down the shore, mounds of refuse stood slumped in squat pyramids—rags, cobs, potsherds and rinds, glass glints, strips of hide—as if built on the trash of an earlier tribe. That was the custom of this place, to build on what remains, and never, ever be free of it.

  Back from the flat shore sprawled a midden of wattle huts and mud, endless mud and lurking dogs. In one hovel a woman in a greyish huipil nursed a dirty-cheeked infant while squatting and poking at a brazier. As if in its smoke she sought some small help in driving the flies away from the infant’s mouth and eyes. This was a blouse such as Xochitl and Amanda wore. I had never seen one dirty. Outside, macehuales† lurched about drunk … dogs fought. For this, I was not yet hard enough.

  Was this really the lake I—and how many others—had dreamt of and conjured? It was not enough to leave home. Now I had to give up even my illusions of what we had seen from up at Ixayac. And everything Grandfather had taught me to see….

  This was not that blue-green eye into which los conquistadores had stared, and I had too—as down through the oculus of a vast underground cathedral. Over there, crouched beneath that rust sunset, was most certainly not the city of the white sunflower, its nectaries tall pyramids of cut gems. I had seen it myself, from Ixayac—seen this shore I now stood on. But then again, my eyes were not so very clear after all, and no longer was I his ray of pure white light.

  I saw this shore become still more hideous as the light failed and a thick darkness gathered. For a few minutes more I could still have looked back to the volcanoes—the white chisel-tip edged in fire, her lover standing over her.

  I would not. That beauty was behind me now.

  But I would never—not dragged by four hundred mules—enter Mexico over this calzada. The old causeways the Mexica had built were as straight as dies—not these corruptions, as full of crooks and sags as an old stick. I would find a boat. The driver glared but said nothing. I guessed that he’d been planning to stop at a pulquería, and that a weakness for drink must surely be the chief hazard of mule-driving. Well, he might as soon talk sense to his mules as stop me getting down.

  It was cold that night alone on the shore. But I was eleven now, and after all the brave talk, here was a thing the intrepid would never fear to do. I dragged my trunk down the beach. Any villager sober enough to see could have followed my trail to where I hid in a thicket. All that night I clutched tight to my chest a purse containing the fifty pesos Grandfather had left to me. It was a lot of money, and it was still his.

  It was for our books.

  Never had I imagined so many mosquitoes might exist in the world. Nor that all at once they would converge on me. At first light I was of a more subdued cast of mind. I climbed into the cargo canoe and went where the man gestured, up into the bow. He wrestled aboard the cedar trunk that carried my earthly attachments. There were books, quite a lot. By the time we had taken on two more passengers, weavers from Puebla and their huge bundles, the canoe seemed more awallow than afloat.

  The boatman pushed off. Seeing the European girl in her one presentable dress and perched at the prow on her cedar trunk, they must have thought her the daughter of some Iberian grandee. One weaver whispered, glaring pointedly at my well-ballasted trunk, “Aicnopilpan nemitiliztli. …”

  Among the poor is no life for kings.

  To which I could not help but retort, “I’m not so rich, friends, but I hear my uncle over there is.”

  They were not much older than I, a couple already, or brother and sister. And once they had recovered from their embarrassment we laughed a little about their surprise and my rich uncle. They did not ask me how I had learned their tongue, and I liked this restraint and saw its dignity, and I liked them as they talked about their hopes for sales and how many days they might have to stay, and whether they would go back at all. Something passed between them then, and I surprised myself in resisting the impulse to ask about it.

  We advanced alongside the causeway, though as the boatman paddled steadily on I was pleased to see us pulling away. I asked why there were even canoes on this shore anymore. He said the canals were still preferred for moving cargo within the city as long as the water was high. Few of the streets were paved, and after just two days of rain most became bogs to the heavy carriages.

  As we talked, my eyes strayed once or twice to the white peaks behind the boatman. The sun had risen between them. I watched it go from gold to red and back to gold as it rose through the smoke plume of Popocatepetl. I decided there could be no real harm in speaking the language of that country once in a while, though all of that was behind me now. The weavers were excited and nervous, and glanced up past me too: for what was behind me, in truth, was the city. As the conversation died out, I turned to look, thinking I might as well get my bearings, since I knew more about the canals of Venice than those of Mexico. I suppose I was a little nervous too.

  Again Mexico was closer than I knew. It filled the horizon—a canvas stretched wide as a painted sail. The scene had just that quality of grandeur and poise, of all the business of the world in suspension, stilled in its detail and brushing. The sweep of streets, built up twice my height above the water—hundreds, all running in parallels to the shore; the gold light striking the blocks of the great houses, as if crates stacked for off-loading from a single enormous wharf; smoky blue shadows between the buildings; grey-black threads ravelling up into a coppice above the chimneys….

  Right beside us, to the south, were the floating gardens, faintly undulating. Around and amidst them worked scores of canoes, their sides flashing like the wet bills of cormorants in the morning sun. These were the farmers at their floating crops.

  And all the furious activity at the entrance to the canal! Banging and shouts, the clank of iron, and ringing steel. Horses and mules, the clatter of carriages, a swarm of men and bundles. And half of these men were black.

  Africans …

  Close now to the entrance, I saw that the Indians were ferrying bundles up from canal to cart, and the Africans down from cart to canal. They were as two colonies, red and black, in a teeming mercantile exchange of ant wares and formic delicacies. And I—I was bringing, high in the holds of my belly, a whole colony of butterflies….

  We entered the canal.

  My uncle was rich, one of New Spain’s richest men; and he had half the slaves in his charge out looking for me. The driver had not rushed to a pulquería, after all, but had prudently gone to give Aunt María my views on causeways. It was Aunt María herself who was waiting at the dock.

  She stood looking very tall atop a flight of broad, shallow steps. She stood tall, too, as the only woman in her generation of our family to have conceived a child in wedlock, or to have achieved marriage at all. I had met her just once, but there was no mistaking her. Hers was the cultivated pallor of one whom luxury permits to evade the sun; her hair was a shade lighter than Isabel’s deep chestnut, with glints of copper at her temples. And yet they were unmistakably sisters. Like Isabel’s, her brows were black, but not so long, nor wide-spaced, nor arched. It was Aunt María’s nose that was long and arched.

  Isabel was beautiful. And her beauty was for me an annihilation—no matter how I held the mirror, all I could see were her traits. As a way to ward off that beauty, I had once in a poem made her nose ‘aquaductile’ in its straightness and strength of line.

  But María’s was truly aquiline and she
, quite striking. In the prepossession of her nose, her pallor and the heavy blackness of her brows, there was the handsome brooding of a crow.

  To see better, no doubt, for she seemed a little short-sighted, she had drawn back her white veil—veils were fashionable again, I learned, if only among gentlewomen recently landed from Europe. Which, of course, María was not. Around her neck hung a heavy silver chain and a thick crucifix inlaid with onyx. Otherwise she was dressed chin to heel in black shimmering silk.

  She looked calm amidst the bustle of porters, and well she might: many of these men were her husband’s slaves. But with a dozen running thither and yon looking for me, she had known exactly where to come. She had come alone, and she had driven herself in a light phaeton just right for two, hitched to a charcoal-grey horse. The carriage was spotless, unlike every other carriage or cart in sight. Uncle Juan, largely at his own expense, saw to it that at least one street running from his house to each of the southern and eastern canals was paved. And though the tenayuca† was rough, I think I could have enjoyed that first ride; as, in other circumstances, I think I could have liked her. But this was my jailer conducting me into exile.

  And so began the first year of captivity. At least I was not made to walk to the gates.

  “Isabel warned me you were willful.”

  That was all either of us said on the ride.

  I had never seen before that day a house with three storeys, nor could I have imagined wanting one. The doors were tall and impressively carved, the grillwork at the windows heavy and elaborate. The frames of doors and windows alike were of a blond limestone, as was the lintel, whose ends were scrolls carved like the capital of Ionic columns. And in each of the scrolls’ oculi I noted with grim satisfaction the ugly little face of a gargoyle.

  The house itself stood as if cut from a quarry of dark grey slate. The grey was relieved only by a thin strip of blue and white tiles between each of the storeys, and another strip of tiling running under the eaves, with three more gargoyles as waterspouts. The way the sky was lowering, I wouldn’t have to wait long to see them retching water.

  In Panoayan I’d never thought much about the rain. There was always a big tree to sit beneath, and it was dry under the arcades. Here, the rain would add one more wall to those already keeping me in. Certainly I’d never associated rain with moods.

  The first rule of this new life: We were never to go out alone.

  Since Aunt María dragged poor Magda everywhere, this injunction was of little concern to my cousin. She was five years my senior, and with so little natural sparkle that her mother had undertaken to vigorously fossick the New World’s largest city for marriage prospects. In my years in that house, and in a city thick with the scions of mining magnates, not a single one panned out.

  I would never have imagined such an enormous house could so quickly become insufferably small. First, because it was only half a house. Uncle Juan’s parents, a wizened little pair glimpsed only on the rarest occasions, had the whole of the opposing half. Which is to say that halfway to the back, on each floor, the corridor was blocked by a locked door built into a wooden divider. What’s more, the courtyard was sectioned neatly in two by a heavy canvas, lashed at the sides to the handrails and columns of each storey’s inner corridor and fastened at the top to a metal mesh, whose original purpose had been to keep out intruders and doves. So although the courtyard was technically open to the sky, the rain and light fell in tiny, cramped squares.

  At ground level all this oppressive cloistering gave way to farce, for the canvas was tied down to buckles not only set in the flagstones but sunk even into the bottom of what must once have been a lovely fountain. I came to see in all this the letter of some arcane covenant on the sharing of family property, or the judgement of Solomon to halve the child. But not at first, when it just seemed laughable. At least once a week, one of the Indian servants was down scrubbing the greenish growth from our side of the canvas, and there were moments of true hilarity in watching her try to co-ordinate scrubbing motions with her counterpart—giggling and shouting instructions—on the other side of the bulging, bumping sheet. I had read of wedding nights in distant countries that might look thus.

  And if all this were not enough to make me run for the doors, our half was a warehouse. The courtyard was choked with crates and bales, and the end of each corridor was stacked to the ceiling with inventories that seemed never to turn over. The secret path to vast fortunes was indeed perplexed and tortuous.

  The next rule: We were to go to Mass twice a day, bent like porters under the heavy crucifixes assigned for the excursion. It was as if Aunt María hoped the three of us might be called from the pews to assist in the ceremonies. In churchly company, she would go to awkward lengths to trot out a near-complete store of the idioms of divine praise and favour, very much as I had done to practise Nahuatl. God willing … Heaven be praised … If it be His will. But in the cathedral itself she often freshened them, as if to prove her usage no mere formula: Jesus be praised; if it be the will of Jesus Our Saviour; may the Son of God, Redeemer and Messiah, forbid …

  We were never to have friends over without notice.

  In my case, this could never be anything but hypothetical, since I met no one on my own.

  We were never to dress up as boys and go to the Royal University.

  Never. It was not to be.

  The Royal University was a preposterous idea for a girl. And dressing up as a boy … just this year someone in lascivious dress had been caught walking in the main square after curfew and discovered to be a man. After the trial, he was hanged in the square before a jeering mob.

  And there would be a special penalty for sneaking out. Any domestics in a position to prevent me would be let go, nor would they find a place elsewhere if Aunt María had any say, and of course she had a very great deal of say.

  This was coercion—extortion.

  Good, we understood each other.

  It was no hollow threat. Maybe this is why I never sought to know the servants, though we sometimes exchanged a word or two in Nahuatl. The better I knew them, the more I cared, and the more inescapable became my prison.

  While most of the great houses used Africans, our house employed only Indians, and it was widely acknowledged that slaves were much better off than serfs. The Africans were hardier, more resistant to disease, less numerous and often learned a trade. There were standards of fair treatment and there was a commission to appeal to. There was competition for their services, and they could at least hope to save enough to one day purchase their freedom. Some could hope to be freed by their holder.

  An Indian was the property of the conquistadors. Or so it was at first. The Conquest was privately financed. Los conquistadores had taken enormous risks and expected a return. “Return?” Abuelo had snorted.“Cortés had all but stolen his ships! Was honour not a return, or service to the Crown—was the greater glory of God not return enough?” A sneer was not something that rode easily on Abuelo’s broad face, but there it had sat, like a moustache on a calf. From his lip the sneer had faded quickly but not from his voice. Five hundred conquerors had been made encomenderos by the Crown. The encomienda was the return on a capital investment—New Spain divided among five hundred shareholders. But they had not the faintest interest in land. Dumbfounded, I had asked if I’d heard him right.

  The conquerors of America had not the faintest interest in land.

  Unless it was in Spain, of course. And even there, no peninsular gentleman would ever let himself be seen at manual labour of any kind. Horses, bulls and swords stood as the allowable exceptions. “Transportable wealth. Liquid capital. Gold, Angelina.” Gold and rents.

  Every village in New Spain was for rent. Villagers from Panama to Florida to California were subject to pay tribute as serfs and could be rented like a house. A block of houses, rather, for they were rented out together.

  Their nickname, though, was burritos. Little beasts of burden. This part Abuelo didn’t teach
me. I had to learn it in the city.

  “Of course, Juanita, matters could not stand this way for long. Even allowing for the depreciation of disease and death, let us say four percent a year, the resource yielded a return out of all proportion to the outlay.” The conquistador’s lease was redrafted to expire at death and the property reverted to the commonwealth. These days wealthy businessmen rented villages from the Crown, or from landholders such as the Church. The Church cared about land.

  Paid a wage now, the Indians could be sent home at night to their own districts, so did not even have to be fed and housed. For the past hundred years, the city administration had struggled to contain them in five barrios, five blocks of rental properties. The Europeans were to live in the centre and, above all, to keep the Indians away from the Africans, whose cults and superstitions were almost incurable.

  So, too, proved the epidemic of mestizaje.† Passion leapt the barriers, life drove roots beneath them, opportunity sifted through every crack, and all made a mockery of the prophylaxis.

  In but one respect were the Indians envied by the other races: they were exempt from the jurisdiction of the Inquisition. So highly prized was the exemption that many of the light-skinned castes learned Nahuatl or the Mayan language so, if the need arose, they could pretend to be serfs.

  The Inquisition had fetched a poor return on its investment in the Indians. Loving persuasion had proved so much more effective an evangelist, and harshness the very thing the Indians best resisted. Here was the first lesson Cortés learned, and at the urging of his translator he befriended Moctezuma. Indian resistance, on the other hand, was a fearsome thing. And here was Cortés’s second lesson, taught in the siege of Tenochtitlan, where tens of thousands starved rather than surrender, where the women fought like Saracens, where the starving died with war axes in their hands.

  The lake, too, had been a friend once, before the caravels and cannon. Yes there was steel, yes there was cavalry, but the single decisive engagement of the Conquest was a naval assault, on a white city on an island on a lake.