Hunger's Brides Page 3

  Grandfather was a capable if reluctant farmer, but how he loved riding out over the land. Sometimes it was to El Dorado, or the land of Quivira, or the Seven Golden Cities of Cíbola, and then he would return to share out some of that fabled hoard: a legend, a rumour, a report he’d just read or heard.

  “We live, Angelita, in the El Dorado of legends. Sabes, not so many years ago, on his way to a city on a lake, a man named Hernán Cortés—”

  “Because he was courteous?” I asked, eager to show off.

  “I doubt he was called Cortés for his courtesy. With his soldiers and a few horses, this Cortés was coming from the east, up from the sea. Sometimes they had to hack their way through the densest jungles they had ever seen. But as they worked their way upwards, he and his men began to climb through a cool forest of cedar and pine. Huge trees with growths hanging from them, like the beards of prophets. Yes, feel—but much longer than mine. Once at the pass, Cortés stood gasping in the thin air, satisfied he was now higher than any man had stood in Europe. Yet the peaks soared still a thousand varas† above their heads. He was surer than ever that it was indeed snow up there—though it was beyond belief, in such steamy latitudes as these. Can you see it, Juanita, the stubble on those lean wolf jaws of his? To confirm the marvel, he sent up ten men to fetch down ice.”

  Grandfather neglected to add that they went also to fetch sulphur for their cannon; nor did he mention that Xochitl was from the pass and was his source for the story of the ice. She would one day tell me her people were greatly reassured by such a display of human curiosity from one rumoured to be the god FeatherSerpent returning from the East.

  But they had never seen a curiosity quite like this.

  “Just a few leagues from this hacienda—just there, beyond that next hill—Cortés came down from our sacred mountain to meet the Mexican Emperor. They met on the south shore of the lake that circled the imperial city … great Tenochtitlan.”

  “Mexico,” I said gravely.

  “Yes, Angel, and here everything begins. See them: Cortés and Moctezuma† stand in the shadows of late afternoon, beside the longest of the stone causeways connecting the island to the land. This one, which we have now renamed the Calzada de San Antonio, is as straight as the horizon at sea on a still day. And wide enough to accommodate six carriages abreast! Before this day, the emperor’s feet have never been allowed to touch the earth. Now, he stands ankle-deep in soft black mud. Into that mud he inserts the full length of his index finger. And what comes next stuns his attendants. He places it in his mouth …”

  Here was a gesture of grace, of surrender to charys, that Grandfather considered worthy of an Athenian—of old Pericles himself.

  In a few weeks the great Moctezuma II, Regent of the Fifth Sun, incarnation of the war god BlueHummingbird who commanded a million men, would be taken prisoner in his own palace by a ragtag band of mercenaries. Iron clad, gold crazed, famished, reeking from the purulence of their wounds. Or so, listening to my grandfather, I imagined them. Locatable by their smell even through the stench of the dread Black Room, its every surface tarred in blood. There, stunned by their success, uncanny in its suddenness, they hold Moctezuma captive. Though captained by a lawyer (¡un abogado!—¡imagínate, Juanita!) they are in truth led and guided by a woman the Mexicas had sold to the Mayans as a slave. Now she has returned to bring her people, the chosen ones, a very different destiny.

  “The unstable margins of things, indeed—eh, Angelina?”

  The unstable margins of things…. The feature that gives Nepantla its name stands to the east: across the entire east, where the ground is heaved and rutted as by a titan’s wheel of quakes and slides and lava floes. The country of my birth lies across the foothills of two white-tipped volcanoes. Iztaccihuatl and Popocatépetl. WhiteLady and SmokingStone. One dormant, the other murderously active. As the legend goes, they are lovers from rival tribes. She lies in a drowse of stone—struck down by a wizard’s curse—while he, distraught, stands fuming over her, in a tower of ice and the black rock the Egyptians first called basalt.

  Their slopes are the dark green of pine and cedar. After a rain in the afternoon, which falls as snow at the peaks, the fresh-glazed ice dazzles in the sun’s decline, as the rains drift beyond them like a blue-black scrim. The effect is theatrical yet they are real—one deadly real—and from real stuff fashioned: rock, rain, ice, the very earth. Two immense actors up on the East’s solitary dais. There in the setting sun they blaze up as if footlit by colossal lanterns. In autumn, when the rains come daily, rainbows are commonplace, prosaic as the tremors. And so it is not uncommon for them to be framed, quite perfectly, quite implausibly, under an immense rainbow. As though she has fallen in a bower of shimmering iris …

  Ever since I can remember, ever since making a childish pledge to always live within sight of them, they are those lovers, more than they are mountains; they are that play, and the play can only be reality itself. This theatre has been my grandfather’s gift to me.

  I craved more time with him. But he took any excuse to be out, away from the place in Nepantla, which he conceded his daughter ran more ably than he ran the hacienda up in the pass. She could outwork any man, as Grandfather sometimes said to reassure himself. She was a force of nature, everywhere at once, startlingly so, like the first burgeoning of spring. Giving orders to Xochitl in the kitchen, riding out to the orchards and cornfields, butchering calves, fretting over lambs, shouting instructions to the charros as they bred the horses. All this, the work of a day.

  Father’s company, on the other hand, was too rare a delicacy to crave, which did not keep me from brooding on his absences. Grandfather one day referred to him as an adventurer, and this struck me as a calling of the highest sort. He was like a handsome ghost, a restless paladin of old whose occasional visits were so very vivid and memorable that all the rest seemed a fabrication. One spring day—I might have been four—felt particularly real. He had thrown open the portals and called in to all the girls to come out for horseback rides. They ran happily after him, but I’d been watching from the roof as he had put a fiery roan stallion, stamping and backing and screaming, through its paces. It was that horse he would now have us ride.

  Josefa, and even María who was almost an adult, balked at being hoisted into a saddle that bore every sign of becoming a catapult. Though frightened I sprinted down from the roof, but by then there was Amanda, in my place, looking tiny and demure and being led about so placidly she might as well have been on the back of an enormous roan lamb.

  I felt someone behind me at the door, and turned to find Isabel. In that proud face I thought I’d seen every variation on anger, but this one shaded swiftly into hurt. Which on her I had never seen and did not see for long before she turned away and walked across the courtyard to her room.

  Father had seen her face too. So ended the children’s rides, before my turn, as he thundered off on a long ride of his own.

  Abuelo, for his part, stayed away for weeks sometimes. I came to think of men as a variety of migratory bird. Father on his noble and secret missions. Grandfather, reading, riding between the two haciendas, mending fences, tinkering with his little hydraulic projects—windmills, watering ponds, catchment basins.

  It must have been the next spring, during one of those rare planetary conjunctions that brought Father and Abuelo to the hacienda at the same time. On the hill above the house Grandfather had recently installed a millpond to be replenished on windy days by the small windmill he’d had the workers build to his specifications. One morning he took me out with him right after breakfast. Though the ground in Nepantla was dry, he explained, the real problem was not the scarcity of water but rather the swiftness of its drainage. For this I must be wary of dry streambeds.

  I knew this already.

  “Imagine, Juanita, flash floods from a blue sky! Boulders, trunks and mud all washed down in massive swipes.” This was dramatic even for him. “And so, in a way—no?—Time itself has gouged these ravine
s. As with an adze—there—in its fist. See how, between the arroyos, the high ground runs like roots? Are they not like the buttress roots of cypresses?”

  I felt strangely anxious to know what he was leading up to.

  Did I know that the people of this place once believed our volcano held up the sky? Here he included the heavens in the generous sweep of his arm. “They saw SmokingStone as a tree, rooted in the earth, its plumes of smoke and steam as branches supporting the heavens.” His eyes met mine.

  “We live, Angelina, in the Manoa of legends and—”

  “I know, Abuelo, and you are its El Dorado.”

  He put his arm around me then. We looked out over the world he had helped me to see, that I still see as if through his eyes. The stage of the horizon and the forms beyond. The dry, grassy hills, the blond camber of their narrow spines. The orchards rising up from the ravines. Intersecting diagonals of deep green mango trees and avocados. Volcanoes that were lovers, who were really cypresses….

  “Abuelito!” I cried, eager to please him. “See how the hills are like snakes now?—see the diamonds on their backs, their green bellies.”

  He looked down at me as if surprised, and with a sober nod of that great head replied, “Why no, Juana Inés, I had not, until now.”

  And then he began to explain that we would be leaving Nepantla. The land was even richer up at the other hacienda. With my mother tending it, we would earn nearly as much as the two places combined.

  “Abuelito, you’re not leaving us?”

  “No, no, child, not I.” I should have guessed, then. “You’ll like it up there. Just as much as here.”

  The message in all this was clear enough, I thought, with his parables of the tree, the mountain that changes yet abides: Permanence in change. I would soon read as much in Heraclitus. I wanted to shout, Of course I will love the other place, Abuelo—it has your library. Touched by his concern, I kept this to myself.

  But that wasn’t what he was trying to say at all.

  Abuelo and I were looking back down at the ranch house. He was quiet a moment. A thread of mesquite smoke rose from the clay chimney pipe. A loose tissue of other such threads trailed up from the plain. Ewes bleated in the high corral of ocotillo; little red flowers budded among the thorns. There was the sweet scent of mesquite, and also of sage. And in the big laurel spreading its shade over the south wall a flock of urracas raised a castanet racket of the usual chatter….

  It was one of the rare times Abuelo talked to me of my father. “Did you know, child, that I was the one to introduce him to my daughter? With you here beside me now, how could I regret that miracle? I was up in the pass riding on a narrow trail when I met him. A natural horseman!” This was a thing Grandfather knew how to admire. “Your father is descended from the great Basque whalers. They crossed many times, you know, before Columbus ever thought of it.” He found it deeply honourable that Father had come to America to restore his family’s noble fortunes.

  “It was always my great hope that they would marry. The love at first was obvious. But when your father did not come back for Isabel’s lying-in this last time …”

  Was that the time when Abuelo came to bring us down from the cell? Yes it was, and yes, my head was very angelic.

  “I am not sure my daughter has yet abandoned her hopes. But never mention this. She would rather die than confess it.”

  The great current of his talk faltered then. Isabel called, and for once I skipped gladly down to the house. All that day I was in high spirits, playing on the patio with the others—my sisters and Amanda, and the younger children of some of the field hands. Usually I found such play difficult, though I loved to observe the others from the roof, admiring their capacity to invent new games on the spot, then enjoy those games well past the point when I might have stopped.

  That day, Father was sitting at a table under the arches in the shade of the laurel. Beside his hand on the table rested a little cántaro of cool water, its top covered by a lace mantilla, its clay sides sweating in the heat. He himself had brought it from a journey to a land called Guadalajara. The flask was made of barro comestible, the speciality of potters in a village far to the west. One could eat the clay when the water was gone, a notion that enchanted me.

  Even slouched in a chair, he seemed coiled to spring onto the back of a horse. He had a quick mind and was often amused by my little offerings, but the trick was holding his attention. I thought to ask him how the cántaro was able to keep the water so much cooler than the surrounding air. The thing was somehow to connect this to horses. Did he think, as I did, that by allowing the sides to sweat, like a horse, it dispensed its heat faster than the air could replace it? Or was there something about evaporation itself that cools? Since dogs didn’t sweat in the heat but panted, were they panting sweat?

  I was an idiot—what did he care about dogs?

  But phantoms were perhaps formed of vapour after all, as was sometimes said. For when one entered a room did not everyone feel cold? So why oh why did I now stand before this one, flushed and sweating and babbling? I was about to ask, but my paladin of smoke was so absorbed in watching Josefa and Amanda playing with spinning tops beside me at the well. And yet I had no sooner observed the patterns being traced on the flagstones than—impelled by this madness of mine for hidden forms4—I called for some flour to be scattered there in order to better apprehend the effortless motus of the spherical form; whose impulse, persisting even when free and independent of its cause,5 should—it seemed to me then—be mathematically describable….

  Exactly how I conveyed all this, I can’t recall. He only blinked those great brown eyes at me and shook his head a little, like a horse adjusting to a bridle.

  But later that day he did take me out for a short ride on his big roan. So I supposed I was partly successful. When he swung me down, I curtsied. “Gracias, señor caballero.”

  “Oh, but it was my pleasure,” he said and bowed. “And anyway, señorita, I owed you a ride….”

  He remembered. He remembered.

  That night I lay awake well into the night, sitting up finally to watch the slopes of the volcano glisten in the moonlight and thinking about the geometry of pyramids. We were going to the mountain. We were going to the library. Perhaps Father would like it there. Enough to stay.

  A wind was blowing from the west. A shutter was banging somewhere. I suppose I didn’t realize how late it was…. All at once I had a sort of childish revelation about the addition of pyramidal angles and rushed out of bed to share it with him. Rather than take the long way round through the arcades, I ran barefoot across the windy courtyard to their room, in which I could see a light, and blundered in on a scene not meant for my eyes. It was the first time I’d seen my mother that way, yet I felt a shock of recognition as though finally seeing her as she was. I couldn’t have explained how, but I knew then that some of the sounds I’d associated with the night were not from the fields or hills but from her.

  She was like a panther, beautiful and carnal and wild-eyed. She was not ashamed, but this was no time for my nonsense. “Child!” she rasped, “will you never learn your place?”

  Will you never learn your place.

  He reached out an arm to restrain her. It is my last image of him: sweat drenched and lean, his eyes deep and blackened by lamplight, his hair atangle, and even as he withdrew from her grasp his movements were all fluid grace. He smiled gently, and shot me through with a look I will never to my last day forget—a farrago of melancholy and regret. Was there still a trace of that look in his eyes the next morning as he turned in the saddle to cast one last glance over the slopes of the Smoking Mountain? I like to imagine he was regretting bitterly even then that he would not see me grown up. He was leaving, my phantom pursuing a fantasy—wealth, glory, some goddess of Fortune. To be a hidalgo in Spain, a latter-day Conquistador back from the New World, and eligible at last to marry up to the station his family had fallen from—with one of the stale and pasty virgins of hi
s dusty Basque village.

  He’d made up his mind. And looking into those rich, dark eyes, I knew. I knew, and my mother did not; even as her soul merged with his, she did not know. Even as it shattered like glass beneath the blows of a hammer, she did not know. But I did, in that instant. And for this my mother never quite forgave me.

  After that night I ceased being a little girl in her eyes.

  †Meh-SHEE-ka(s)—the dominant nation of the people loosely called Aztecs, whence ‘Mexican’ and ‘Mexico’

  †twenty-five miles

  †each roughly a yard

  †the variants Moctezuma, Montezuma and Moctehuzoma are standardized to Moctezuma here

  JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ

  F. J. Warnke, trans.

  Que contiene una fantasía contenta con amor decente

  Detente, sombra de mi bien esquivo,

  imagen del hechizo que más quiero,

  bella ilusión por quien alegre muero,

  dulce ficción por quien penosa vivo.

  Si al imán de tus gracias, atractivo,

  sirve mi pecho de obediente acero,

  ¿para qué me enamoras lisonjero

  si has de burlarme luego fugitivo?

  Mas blasonar no puedes, satisfecho,

  de que triunfa de mí tu tiranía:

  que aunque dejas burlado el lazo estrecho

  que tu forma fantástica ceñía,

  poco importa burlar brazos y pecho

  si te labra prisión mi fantasía.

  In which she restrains a fantasy

  Stay, elusive shadow that I cherish,

  Image of the enchantment which I love,

  Illusion fair for which I gladly perish,

  Sweet fiction for whose sake in pain I live.

  If my breast responds to your attractive graces

  As to the magnet the obedient steel,

  Why woo me with your flattering embraces,

  To flee me later, mocking my appeal?