Hunger's Brides Read online

  So what exactly couldn’t I see? What didn’t I know? What great night had so blinded my eyes and mocked me now?

  I couldn’t see Amanda was an Indian.

  I didn’t know she was my burro.

  And now four years later how it mocked me to my face. All day, as my Quinceañera approached, and would not stop.

  Give her a wise and understanding heart, to have sovereignty over a great people.

  I tried to think of the other things I had learned and known and seen, and done—some of them fine, even in this place.

  But they meant nothing to me.

  And I thought, How do I defend myself from this, make learning my shining shield? Because it’s what I know, my knowledge—my mind—my great gift that mocks. She was the best part of me—my enemy is inside. She does not know, she does not see?—she knows too much! She knows of the four-year fast, she knows of PreciousFeatherMat, she knows of the road of shame into the underworld, the nine levels of hell, knows about the wisdom of proverbs and the sacredness of a rabbit satchel. She knows all about rates of return and rates of depreciation, and loving persuasion and friendship. She knows of the harlots down in the street with nowhere to turn, she knows of Solomon’s sword and his judgements. She knows too much. Divide the child.

  She knows now what Amanda knew. She sees what Xochitl saw. Twins who could not both have a childhood—one could or neither. Two lifeless halves, one living whole. Decide. Divide.

  And Xochitl allowed this out of love and the terrible purity of a wise and understanding heart. And Amanda heard Xochitl and gave herself up to this love, out of the most perfect and incomprehensible grace.

  Then, when I thought I could bear no more, my abuelo came, the night of my fifteenth birthday.

  He came twice in that month. Not in a shining vision, not as an apparition from the beyond, but as a warmth and a voice so natural that I knew both came from within. This, more than anything that he said, helped close the hole in my chest. My friend is inside me too.

  Twice that month he sat with me, and though he has never yet come back except in dreams, I’ve always felt I knew where to find him. Both times he said very little, which was a little unlike him. The first time he began with a simple question. The second time he insulted me.

  Who has the eyes of Thucydides now?

  Hugeous jolt-head.

  It was a month when things changed. Mercy was a beginning.

  Uncle Juan came the morning after my birthday. As he glanced discreetly around at the books and papers scattered over the floor, I realized he had not come fully into the room in four years.

  “We may have to build you another bookshelf.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I just stood by the window looking at him.

  “Now that you’re a woman of the world”—his smile held a trace of irony but kindness too—“I have a business proposition for you.” He was a big man, soberly dressed, with a long, serious face. The forehead was high, the jaw heavy and long. His hair was a pale, papery brown, singed grey at the temples.

  “Does it have to do with pulque?”

  “Palaces.”

  “Palaces …”

  “A competition of poetry. The incoming viceroy is its patron, I am its sponsor. And still I have not been able to meet him. My friends think you could do well. You don’t have to win, just be among the last ten or so. Be on the platform. The judges pick the last three, he picks the winner. I want him to see you.”

  “A business proposition.”

  “The finalists get a private audience with the Viceroy and his wife.”

  “Is that your prize or mine?”

  “If you’re a finalist, anything you ask.”

  Anything I ask … a little child who knows not how to go out or come in.

  “Uncle Juan … you’ve been kind. Generous. But I don’t want anything. Thank you. I don’t want this.”

  He shrugged, his face showing no trace of irritation. “I just thought you might enjoy the day. I know your grandfather would have. These tourneys are quite an affair.”

  I saw how good my uncle was at his business. “And how would you know that, Uncle?”

  “How? I knew the man.”

  “Oh. How well did you?”

  “It may be hard for you to imagine a time before your birth, but he came here often then. María is his daughter. You haven’t forgotten.”

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry to say this, Juana, but I think you have. He was a friend to me and a friend to my parents, who have few. He always tried very hard with María. He was always welcome in my house. He used to stay for weeks. Consulting archives … special collections at the Royal University. There was a man to talk with. You remember that, of course.”

  I remember.

  “As soon as you could read, whenever he came to buy books it was always for the two of you. You were all he talked about. His best new stories were all about you. Your reading, your sketches. It wasn’t always easy for María. Your mother of course had sketched as a child. There was a story he loved to tell about the two of you translating musical theories from—Italian, was it? Portuguese?”

  “He told you?”

  It was Italian, Uncle.

  “You seem also to forget how you answered María when she tried to speak to you of him. You were not the only one hurt by his passing. Does it never enter your mind that some people are afraid of you? But no, never mind that. We’re talking of him now. Don Pedro told me himself about your month at school with the nuns, the day of your ABCs.”

  “Sister Paula? You’ve known …” Even this.

  “Yes, Juana, all this time. In his last few years it was obvious the books were no longer for him at all. He stayed only a few days. And very near the end he came for a single book. Do you remember what it was?”

  “On falcons.”

  “He wasn’t well. He left the next morning.” After a moment Uncle Juan’s face brightened. “But I know he liked it in here. So we were happy to give you this room, of course.”

  “What?”

  “His room, Juanita, his bed. Only he ever slept here—how could you not know? María said she told you.”

  “No, she … I didn’t.”

  “That woman of mine—what goes through her mind?” His features hardened. He turned and moved swiftly to the door.

  “Uncle Juan?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why do you think Abuelo would have liked the day?”

  “We went to many bullfights together, Juanita.”

  “But …”

  “Of course—I didn’t say. Our poetry joust, it’s in a bullring.”

  †Nahuatl term for the lowborn

  †a paving of ovoid stones

  †mixing of races

  †fourteen thousand gallons

  †pulque

  †parties, ‘mixers’

  ARTS OF ARMOURY

  After Uncle Juan left my room, Abuelo’s room, it was several hours before I could bring myself to look for María. I had never felt such a violence—of four lonely years—massed black like cliffs of hail. But she was his daughter. The thought, however fleeting, had only ever brought me displeasure. Now it was all I could find to temper the cruelty of what she’d done—keeping Abuelo from me, withholding the one small kindness that would have brought comfort in that house. I might have had him with me through all those nights, through that first year of sleeping afraid.

  How the kind stroke withheld whets the edge of rage.

  “Why?”

  I found her in the salon where the light was good for the reading of Bibles in mid-afternoon. A room of crucifixes, upholstered sofas—sculpted, crested, inlaid, moulded—and one farthingale chair with the upholstery removed for her holy lectures.

  “Come in.”

  “What brings anyone to this?”

  “Juan just left. Ask him.”

  “Nothing in the world dishonours Grandfather so much as pettiness—Why?”

  The Bible lay o
pen in her lap. Her right hand kept the page. Clutched at the base, the onyx cross snapped left and right, spun in the fingers of her left hand. Into her face had come a strange expression, almost of reverie.

  “Why … why … why,” she asked.

  “Petty cruelty and injustice.”

  At that, the cross stopped and her head swung to me. “Why?—because you think you’re better. Why?—because you’re so much like her. Why?—because having you in his room thinking you’re better is like seeing them in the library all over again.”

  “Isabel?”

  “Yes, Isabel.”

  “You’re envious—still?”

  “I could read.”

  “I see that, yes.”

  “Leaving so soon?”

  “I’m nothing like her.”

  “More than you know. Much more like her than him.”

  “Why would I listen to you?”

  “Don’t go. I’ll tell you, if you like.”

  “Give me one reason—”

  “Give you? Give? You live in this house—all you do is take from us. What do you ever give in return? Juan asks one small thing of you.”

  “He asks. You hold the lives of your servants over my head.”

  “Wait—so clever, and still you haven’t found the right question.”

  “Why take me in the first place? Why not send me back? Why the hideous threats? And why put me in that room?—if it’s just to shame yourself and the man who gave you life.”

  “Closer, Juana Inés, you’re getting closer…. Ask why we never questioned a single purchase of yours, when each book brings us closer to ruin.”

  “Whatever are you talking about? I’ve bought nothing on the Index.”

  “‘The Index.’ It’s not just banned books, it’s how many. What do you think attracts their suspicion in the first place? Private collections, Juana.”

  “Then why—”

  “At last a question from you, Niece, I want to answer.” She released her cross and placed her hand beside the other, on the Bible in her lap.

  “Yes, we said nothing, Juana Inés. Because my father was better. Better than any of us….”

  I opened my mouth to answer. But all I wanted now was to be away from her, from here.

  “And you, Niece, are not the only one around here with questions. Like the one I had for your uncle.”

  I paused at the door but did not look back.

  “Can anyone in this house—I asked my dear noble husband—please tell me what they will make, when the day comes, of a creature like you?”

  A creature like me.

  I had started the fight but had no stomach to finish it. I sat at the edge of Abuelo’s bed and stared at the bookshelves, more than half full again. And in each book was a face, filled with what I had not seen. I saw everyone around me knowing more about my life than I did. And what I did know was already sickening enough, the things and the people I seemed prepared to sacrifice.

  Now came the discoveries of these past few hours, appalling me even as I quarrelled with María. How jealous I had been to keep Abuelo’s memory for myself. And there were little things that wounded me in ways I couldn’t understand at all. Isabel had sketched as a girl? I had been told this years ago and pushed it out of my mind. And how unaccountably painful it was to see her and Grandfather in the library through Aunt María’s envious eyes. And to know, or know so late, that Abuelo had friends in this house, that he and Uncle Juan had gone to bullfights—many—together. And then to see my trips to the book shops in a new light. For it was dawning on me that Uncle Juan might have an arrangement with the booksellers to cover my purchases. I had been so proud of my haggling.

  The day and the month after my fifteenth birthday were not always easier than the weeks before it, as I saw still more of what I had failed to see—here was a knowledge I did not seek—of the shapes and silences that lay among and between us, and that I had always shied from. These too were forms, with secret geometric formulas, with their own dark knowledge and power.

  And there was a silence and secret shape in this grim half-house that I had never wanted to know about. It had nothing to do with me, I’d told myself. Let it be their affair. But their affairs and mine were not so separate as I liked to think, and if I, for the thousandth time, had been just a little more attentive to anyone other than myself, I would have seen that María (née Ramírez de Santillana), proud wife of the rich and powerful Juan de Mata, was afraid. The signs lay silently all about her, only waiting to be read. The crosses, the Masses, the bizarre formulas of piety, the endless reading of just one book.

  Uncle Juan asked if I had never thought people might be afraid of me. I hadn’t, and if this thought were not enormous enough, there was the mystery of why. That María might be one of those people hadn’t occurred to me either. But it was true—she was afraid. With so many enormities to grapple with at once, I missed the obvious. She, at least, was not afraid of me for myself but because she feared something much more dangerous.

  That night after our quarrel, when the house was quiet, I stood at the railing along the third-floor colonnade. Over the courtyard the stars were mapped in a mesh of fine-drawn wire, and as through a sieve darkness poured down over the flagstones.

  After a time a servant went to the well to fill a bucket. She staggered with it back into the kitchen. The surface grew still again. Between kitchen and fountain, splashes gleamed dully on the flags. As I watched, it seemed as though each stone rested on the face of a gargoyle smiling into the earth as if behind a hand. As I walked back to my room, the voice of the blackness and mockery felt nearer by the instant. Inside, the charm of Abuelo’s presence, fading like a scent, seemed frail magic against an enemy whose echoes had slipped in behind me. Frail magic, but it came from within and felt like all I had, these few words he had left me.

  Who has the eyes of Thucydides now …? he’d asked, smiling gently and sitting where there was no chair. And what he said next, I knew I had heard something like it before, but from my mother’s lips. You have the most wonderful eyes, Angelina, for seeing far. But none of us sees everything at once, no one can see near and far at the same time. Try for yourself. Hold up your finger. Like this …

  This was the month when my four years of confinement ended. But no, things were not always easier. For there came to me next a remembrance of a day not long after Abuelo and I had talked about Melos….

  Grandfather awoke from his afternoon nap tremendously refreshed—beaming. He climbed like a small bear down from the hammock and came to sit at the table. He glanced at the manual I had open before me—gave the impression it could have been on any topic at all, so keen was he to exercise his faculties. “Ah, Jacobi Topf. The very greatest of the armourers, Juanita. Greater even than the Colmans, without a doubt. Grace without ostentation, ornament but never at the cost of effectiveness.” It gave him pleasure to see me looking into this again. And what, did I think, was the work of the great armourers—true art or mere craft? For in the armourer’s fabrica,† who can fail to hear the echo of the Creation, feel the Hand that turned and piped our clays …?

  The late-afternoon light slipped in through the columns and lit the wall beside us. Xochitl had swabbed out the courtyard; the wet slate cast up a soft glow into the library, warming the ceiling and tops of the shelves. His great sun face was washed clear as the first dawn. Even the tired right eye looked less bleared—if not emerald clear, then of gold-green marble.

  The first few birds were coming for their evening bath in the stone basin. I had heard Isabel’s horse canter by not long before. She would be coming in any minute.

  “And is the armourer’s art”—he was growing, by the minute, more passionate—“not the very echo of God’s highest handiwork, for did not Jacobi Topf forge even the hardest metals in the image of Man?” Grandfather had turned towards the brightness in the courtyard and was fashioning, with those bony hands, some visor or knee-cop or pauldron of light.

  “And is this
art, Juanita, not a vessel of Man, even as the body is a vessel of the soul? And does not this armour, in shielding his flesh, act like our Church in guarding his soul?”

  But no, not at all. I thought it a skill more like pottery. It was so finicky. All the plodding and plotting, the stickling—the fussing.

  I had said this with a vehemence that surprised me and in a tone I would never normally take with him. Needing now to justify myself, I took pains over the next two days, went to lengths great even for me, to marshal my arguments. Yes, this was a craft, a trade like any other. I distilled for him its essential qualities. In the armourer’s anxious measurements, he is like a tailor with his tape. And is he not the very image of a tinker with his tools and tins? His obedience to contour likens him to the upholsterer as much as to the sculptor. In his concerns with joints and articulations who can fail to see the maker of toys or the wright of mills and carts? Over the gussets see how he frets like a sastra!† In all the padding and plasters and unguents for blisters, why, he is like a nurse brawling with a cobbler.

  At any other time in my life then or since I would have deferred to him, for the sheer pleasure of hearing him again, to feel that river of his talk washing over me as it had so rarely done of late. But it was so soon after Melos, and I could find no beauty in the work of the armourers, not even Jacobi Topf.