Hunger's Brides Page 4

  But you cannot in satisfaction boast

  That your tyranny has triumphed over me:

  Even if you escape the noose I fashioned

  To bind the form of your evasive ghost,

  It matters not to flee my arms impassioned,

  If you’re imprisoned in my fantasy.6

  ABECEDARIO

  In leaving Nepantla I lost a father. During the slow, jolting journey up to our new home in the pass I recovered the twin I’d all but forgotten. Amanda and I were wordlessly skirmishing over who was to get the preferred seat, nearest the back of the mule cart. To settle this, naturally we needed to know who was older.

  “Same,” Xochitl said, ever the peacemaker.

  “Not roughly,” I insisted, “exactly.”

  “Same day.”

  No one had thought to mention this. There were so many more interesting things to talk about around our house.

  The same day—I a month early, and Amanda, who was Xochitl’s first, a week late.

  “We’re twins?” Amanda asked, excited, for many of the old stories Xochitl told involved twins.

  No, there was more to it than that, which I at least knew. But it was typical of Xochitl’s kindness that she seemed to share our regret.

  So we alternated at the seat of choice. And within a day or two we were calling each other twin. It was our special joke but it expressed, too, all the wonder of a rediscovery that might never have happened at all. What if I’d ridden instead with María and Josefa up ahead in the first mule cart? What might my life have come to then?

  Isabel drove the lead cart, a mantilla over her chestnut hair to shield it from the dust. My sisters rode next to her. Grandfather ranged back from their cart to circle ours before riding way up ahead, then back again. Our cavalry escort was looking nervous, I thought. Or else guilty about being the most comfortable among us: he sat a horse as easily as a rocking chair. Maybe he didn’t want us to notice his delight to be bringing Isabel to take over his obligations at the hacienda up in the pass.

  It must have been March when Father left, for the ocotillo corral wore a crest of red blossoms. By the time the rest of us were ready to leave Nepantla, it was already late fall.

  All criss-crossed and scored, the road looked like a big ball of twine as it rolled and bumped away under us. To roll over it was to grapple with an unseen wrestler. The awning’s noise and light and sudden shadow as it flopped and flapped were stunning, like being tossed in a blanket. But at least it fanned us. Closing my eyes, I tried to see myself lazing under an ostrich fan, on the deck of a barge on the Nile. The Nile in flood. The Nile in spate, the Nile in cataract …

  This was clearly not working. At any other time I’d have been content to look for menageries in the clouds, as I often did up on the roof in Nepantla, but at least a roof consented to stand still. Grandfather, riding by, said I looked seasick. Seasick—I hadn’t even been on a lake yet.

  The seat next to the muleteer was heaped high with Isabel’s dining room treasures—chairs, cutlery, lacquered sideboards…. So there was no room to ride on our little barge’s upper decks—and anyway the driver was increasingly drunk on pulque, a ferment of the sweet sap of the maguey cactus.

  To distract us, to distract me, for Amanda could sit still for hours, Xochitl had us trying to play a finger game with string. I was willing enough, but we had to reach out one hand or both to steady ourselves so often that the game fell apart. Just then the cart pitched, and a wheel dropped sickeningly into a hole before lurching out again. A small cry escaped Xochitl’s lips. As soon as she could breathe, she called up to the driver, “Are you even awake, you idiot?” Her hip had never knitted properly after the accident, a fall from a horse, and the pain must have been awful.

  However bad, the accident could not have been worse than the agony of birthing Amanda after it. It took two days, and had Xochitl not herself been a midwife, who can say how it might have turned out. But it did spell an end to her work in the fields and her life up in the pass. After the fall and the agonizing delivery, her hair had turned all but white. She wore it in a single lustrous plait, sometimes down her back, but when she worked in the kitchen, behind her head in a coil. Her face was the hue of oiled mahogany. To sketch it, I thought, one must begin with an arrangement of triangles: of her cheekbones, and chin; the black triangles of her eyes when she smiled; the sharp taper of her brows. Two triangles, base to base, formed her lips—the upper smaller, the lower quite full.

  Isabel called her Sochee, but the X was a ‘sh’ and the end was like ‘kettle,’ only lighter. Like ‘rattle’—it was a rattle, a faint rattling at the end. sho-CHITL. Since I could first speak I had been calling her Xochita.

  The driver was now garrulously singing away.

  “Xochita, what’s wrong with him?”

  “Ye iuhqui itoch.”

  “… his rabbit …?” I said. Amanda nodded expectantly. I knew the words but what did they mean?

  “Pulque,” Xochitl said, “once was a sacred drink, offered to the Rabbit.”

  “God was a rabbit?”

  “A double … a mask …”

  And so it was said, sarcastically, that each drunkard had his own way of making the rabbit sacred. Some fight, some sing, some cry and quarrel. And some vomit, as this one had just now done.

  Such is his rabbit. I was enchanted. And so, distracting me in a way the finger game never could have, Xochitl set Amanda and me to guessing at riddles and the meanings of old proverbs.

  “What is a great blue-green jar scattered with popcorn?”

  “The sky!” I said. But Amanda had called it out too, maybe a little ahead of me. “Another!”

  “It is good to see you take an interest, Ixpetz. We should travel together more often.”

  “Ixpetz?”

  “PolishedEye.” Amanda answered.

  “I know, but—”

  “It is used,” Xochitl said, “for someone quick to see into the turnings of things.” By the light dancing in her eyes I could see she really had intended it to rhyme with Inés. My second name came from the Latin for ‘lamb,’ but Isabel used it whenever she was vexed. Which was usually. From then on Xochitl often said Ixpetz as a balm for the rasp in Inés.

  “What about Amanda?” I said.

  “That little one? Cuicuitlauilli in tlalticpac.”

  “Nibbler … of earth …?”

  “A person who takes pains,” Amanda said, “to learn a thing well.”

  Who learns by nibbling at the world. How lovely! NibbleTooth, that would be my name for her. And so, from that day forward we were to become PolishedEye and NibbleTooth, twins and riddlers and best friends.

  She had blue-black hair, just like mine. Her skin was darker than mine, though paler than her mother’s. Pale lips and a square little chin. Brown eyes, while mine were black like Isabel’s. Always near her mother’s side, Amanda had seemed so still I had thought her passive. But now I remembered times when at a nod from Xochitl she burst into a run across the courtyard with an explosive joy, like a foal frisking in new grass. As into a wind she ran, and as she ran the mask of her reserve tipped back like a little hat on a strap.

  It now seemed to me that those times of play were always when Isabel had gone out. Grave, still, poised … Amanda was watchful, not passive.

  “I have one,” I said. “What dresses like a tree, is spiny, and leaves traces like a frightened squid?”

  “What?”

  “Books!” I felt my face flush. This one was not so successful as theirs. “Another, Xochita. Please?”

  But instead it was Amanda who asked, grave and ominous, “Something seized in a black stone forest that dies on a white stone slab.”

  “Tell us….” I shivered, expecting the worst.

  “A head-louse we crush on our nail!”

  “This one is nicer,” said Xochitl, making a wry face. “What goes along the foothills, patting out tortillas with its palms?”

  “A butterfly?”


  Amanda nodded and smiled. She had known, and let me answer.

  Blinking, Xochitl looked from Amanda to me, to Amanda again. “Daughters,” she said gently, “you make my face wide.”

  “It means she’s proud,” said Amanda quietly. Indeed Xochitl’s face was wide and smiling, and her eyes were very bright. And what else did I see there—relief?—but how could Amanda and I have been anything but the greatest of friends?

  Amanda spoke our tongue hesitantly. In her mother’s tongue she was another person—she had come to speak Nahuatl with a fluidity I now lacked. Our family’s language, Castilian, was a sweet deep river of breath, clear water over a streambed of smooth even stones. Nahuatl in the ear was all soft clicks and snicks and collidings of teeth and tongue, like the secret language of sibyls. In the mouth, the canals of the cheeks, Nahuatl was rich, like atole—and thick like pozole!—yes, that was it, a thick stew. With chunks of the world bobbing in it like meat, and you wanted to chew it—but gingerly—anticipating a hardness, a stone or bone shard, against the molars, and …

  But no, that wasn’t quite it either. Until I had tasted pulque I would never quite find it. Pulque, which wrapped itself like a film, clinging, viscous, to the palate and molars and tongue. That was the sensation of Nahuatl in the mouth. Finding this new love right under my nose was like finding Amanda again.

  More proverbs, more riddles.

  If I was PolishedEye and Amanda NibbleTooth, what was Grandfather?

  Xochitl barely hesitated. He had achieved the four hundred, he had accomplished many things.

  And Xochitl herself? She shook her head. What about Isabel, then. WoodenLips.

  What did that mean?—one of firm words, who cannot be refuted. Ah. Well. And Father?

  No.

  Please? No, it was not her place. But Amanda and I badgered her relentlessly. All right, enough.

  Aca icuitlaxcoltzin quitlatalmachica.

  What?

  Aca icuitlaxcoltzin quitlatalmachica.

  One who arranges his intestines artistically. I suspected she had used it ironically but I would put this away as a keepsake, in a quiet place, and work out its meaning myself one day.

  Most of the heat had gone out of the afternoon. I watched the horizon for a while, the colour slowly draining back into the sky. I had glimpsed that a people’s riddles were roads into its world, and our language the mask our face wears. And I now knew riddles to cure seasickness. It was a secret I wondered if the old Basque whalers knew, and if there was hidden somewhere a riddle in my father’s leaving us.

  The road rose and fell more steeply now. I caught a glimpse of two farmhands at the top of the last rise. “What about them,” I said to Xochitl. “Is there a saying for them?”

  She thought for a moment. “Ompa onquiza’n tlalticpac.”

  “The world … spills out.”

  “For the poor, yes. Spills. From their pockets. And from the rags they wear, they themselves spill….”

  At nightfall we halted in the churchyard in Chimalhuacan. Everything in the carts was caked in a fard of fine white dust, including us, as though we had been made up for a play or some ceremony. Grandfather was on friendly terms with the priest here, which was surprising enough since he was always fuming about the priests he rented the haciendas from. But directly he finished his fulmination, he would cast a guilty eye my way to add, “Do not let that keep you from reading your Bible, Juanita. It is another El Dorado.” The priest, Father Juan, was a distant relative and had baptized me. Natural daughter of the Church. That’s what he put on my baptismal certificate, just as he had for María and Josefa.

  We stayed a day to rest a little and bathe. Amanda and I set off exploring, leaving Josefa and María to wail about the state of their hair. We ducked into the church. It was built of a pinkish-brown tezontle cut from lava and rough as a file. Inside, it was dark and cold, with just a few candles shimmering on altars beneath shocks of fresh-cut flowers. As our eyes adjusted in the gloom, I saw the font where I was baptized. Above it a painting of John the Baptist.

  We got as far as the crucero† when Amanda tugged hard at my sleeve—

  “Cinteotl …” she whispered, backing away and pulling me with her. Seated on a rough wooden throne, not crucified but bleeding from scores of wounds—as from volleys of arrows—was a black Christ. Not black—the blood was black, the skin stained a deep mahogany like Xochitl’s. His head was lowered, and in a gesture of great weariness the fingers of his left hand ran through a dust-brown wig of what must have been human hair.

  But what Amanda stared at—almost through—was the ear of corn held upright in his other hand: as of a king, bloodied, with a sceptre of corn.

  I let her drag me back up the aisle, and once she knew I would follow she ran like a deer. Only the stone wall at the west end of the churchyard made her stop and wait for me. The moment passed like the shadow of a cloud, and we burst into nervous laughter. Later we helped Father Juan plant some pine seedlings along the fence. One day, he said, they would grow and shelter the church from the wind. As we worked he told us of his plans to raise funds for a statue of Our Mother Coatlalocpeuh to stand guard at the church entrance.

  Later that afternoon as Father Juan continued to work in the churchyard, Xochitl told us Cinteotl was the son of the Mother of the Corn. So was that Cinteotl or Christ all bloody in there?

  “Maybe a double,” she said, the triangles of her eyes narrowing as she watched Father Juan still digging in the churchyard. “Maybe ask him.”

  We set out again the next day. From Chimalhuacan the road got smoother and rose only gradually. We were moving across the lower slopes of Popocatepetl and heading north towards Iztaccihuatl. The air was cooler, and we travelled mostly in the shade of the enormous pines and cedars that flanked the road, thicker at the base than our little cart was long. We persuaded Xochitl to let us take down the awning.

  Leaning back against the corn sacks, Amanda and I rode quietly for a while, a little stunned by the great white peaks leaning in over the trees. From Nepantla they had been actors alone up on the stage of the horizon. Now they loomed like enormous attendants bent over three small creatures in a crate, or so it felt as we rolled along.

  We had crossed over into a land of giants. Everything towered far above. The axis of this new country was the two volcanoes, so still as to make the sky around them race with clouds and wheeling birds. There were more birds here. Hawks and vultures, as there were back in Nepantla, but also falcons and eagles. Xochitl said we were just big enough now not to be carried off by one. She looked into my wide eyes and laughed. “And tomorrow, Ixpetz, you will have a sunburn on your chin from so much looking up.” Her laugh—hup!—came out in a little swoop, pulling up. It made you want to laugh too. She was almost chatty, a real swallow’s beak, maybe because the road was smoother, less painful for her hip.

  Did I know the story about the volcanoes as lovers?

  “Muchi oquicac in nacel!” I said. Every one of my nits knows that one! Even this earned a smile, and she looked younger by years. Amanda was just as wide-eyed as I was at the change in her. But this was Xochitl’s land.

  “Is it true, Xochita, what Grandfather said about Cortés sending men up there for ice?”

  “The Speaker himself sent relays of runners every day.”

  “The Speaker?”

  “Lord Moctezuma.”

  “Did they see each other, you think?”

  “Who?”

  “Cortés’s men and Moctezuma’s. Going for ice.”

  “Our people saw them. The Speaker was watching from the day their ships landed. He sent his artists to paint them. From hiding places all along the road.”

  “Someone told you?”

  “I saw it. The ships and men. The horses …”

  “You’re not that old, Xochita.”

  She smiled again. “No, bold-tongue, in a book.”

  “You read books?”

  “Ours, not yours. It was my family’s place to keep
the painted books. Intlil, intlapal in ueuetque….† My ancestor was the wizard Ocelotl.”

  “Your ancestor was a jaguar?”

  “There are limits, Ixpetz, even for the young.”

  “I’m sorry….” I felt a flush rushing to my cheeks.

  From the way she smiled I could tell she was not angry. “And your ancestor also, daughter,” she said, squinting one eye at Amanda. “One bold tongue is enough.”

  Xochitl talked lightly on, her face mobile and relaxed, its triangles tilting this way and that. I snuggled in against Amanda to watch the mountains as we listened. The keeper of the painted books, it seemed, was himself part of that book, and in speaking it the keeper kindled a fire in the hearer’s mind. Whereas the book itself was only the ashes of the fire the morning after, cool and delicate and precious, but not the same. To one who loved to sketch, how beautiful this notion of a book not written but painted.

  “Up there—you see, near that big rock? There is a hidden opening. Some of the old wizards escaped through it and under the volcanoes, when the sea and fire descended on our people.”† Her eyes scanned the hills. “Every few years now, early morning or dusk, one of the old ones is seen, wearing the ancient dress and speaking words of jade, the old songs of heart and blood….”

  She glanced around to get her bearings. As she looked away, my eyes followed the windings of the braid coiled tightly at her nape. The strands of grey and black through the thick white coils were like the graving lines of fine chisels in soft stone.

  “Here the ground is holy,” she said quietly. “The words are simple but we lose what it is like….” She seemed reluctant to go on.

  “What is it like, Mother?”

  Her eyes had not left the mountains. I thought she wouldn’t answer. I wondered where exactly she had fallen from the horse and if maybe she was remembering this.

  “Here, Amanda, every step you take, you walk in halls of jade.”

  We lay back quietly, propped against each other and the sacks of maize. I was getting drowsy. The road wove in and out among those trees that had been too large to cut down and uproot. We watched the sky pivoting on its axis. Once, these volcanoes had been the East; now they could be in any direction at all.