Hunger's Brides Read online

  I slept. And dreamed of being carried off on enormous wings … by a bird with an eagle’s head and talons, and the long white neck of a swan.

  I awoke just before Amanda did. A light rain tickled my face. The sun, not far above the western hills, seemed lower than we were, as if the last light rose past us to strike the peaks far above, still radiantly lit. Quietly we watched the soft rain beat traces of silver through the sunbeams where they slanted up among the boughs.

  The trees were thinning. We were entering the town of Amecameca, less than a league from Grandfather’s hacienda. María and Josefa were standing up in the lead cart, gawping shamelessly at the refinements of the largest settlement we had ever seen, and would traverse in under five minutes. Xochitl pointed out the school. “For girls like you.” She looked at me with a crooked smile.

  Then we were off the main road. The track bent sharply east. A gold light poured over our shoulders and cast ahead of us the shadow of a giant with two tiny heads—for Amanda and I were standing now, behind the driver. As we clung to his backrest, Xochitl clung grimly to our skirts to keep us from pitching headlong out. Across the ditch on the left and beyond a windbreak of oaks were orchard rows of apple and peach and pomegranate converging in the distance as they ran. Workers stopped and doffed their hats as Grandfather cantered grandly past. Close to the road, one woman squinted at Xochitl and waved with a little flutter.

  I looked back. She stood there still, the sun setting red beside her through folds of road dust.

  Closer to the house were plots of squash, and beans and tomatoes. We crossed a small stone bridge over a brook that fed the irrigation ditches. At the far end of the bridge stood a little guard post, empty now, as was the watchtower that topped the house. The house itself was framed by two tall African tulip trees, and in each orange blossom glowed the sunset’s radiant echo.

  As in Nepantla, the house was laid out on one floor. Here, though, the roof was not flat but shingled and pitched to shed rain—and, Grandfather promised, sometimes snow.

  The western wall above the veranda was a pocked grey-white. The watchtower and the chapel belfry still blushed the softest rose in the faltering light. Workmen in white cotton breeches and shirts took form round the carts as if exhalations risen of the dusk. We heard the quiet murmurs, “… don Pedro … doña Isabel …” They formed a brigade to relay the sacks and tools to the sheds. No one questioned that Isabel should work beside the men. A woman went with a taper and lit the lanterns strung along the veranda. Amanda and I chafed to explore the house, which was still dark. We were not to go in until Josefa and María had safely swept it out, and they looked in no hurry even to start.

  Grandfather was soon relinquishing his burdens to the men, but when one tried to help Xochitl she refused—a tight urgency in the shake of her head. I distinctly heard one man call her Mother in Nahuatl. I wanted to call out to them—She’s not as old as she looks!—then bethought myself. It looked more like respect than consideration of her age. And I noticed the workers themselves were careful not to let this regard be noticed by don Pedro or his daughter.

  It was full dark now and enthusiastically supported by my sisters, who were sick already of sweeping (though they’d hardly started), we begged to sleep around the firepit. Xochitl was in the kitchen struggling to bring enough order for breakfast in the morning. Isabel was back from the sheds and briskly sweeping out Grandfathers room.

  Grandfather helped us light the fire, a fragrant heap of pine and mesquite, a waver of flame soon reflecting in eight black beady eyes over blankets pulled up to our chins—how chilly the nights were up here.

  “A story please, Abuelo. Please?” He obliged us grandly and continued even after my sisters had nodded off, though weariness crumpled his great round face and bedraggled his big mane. In repayment for his putting my sisters to sleep, I offered to tell him about the wizard Ocelotl. But as I quickly realized that he knew much more than I, I asked instead the difference between priests and wizards. It was complicated, he said, but a priest has words and laws, and a wizard has visions. I wanted to go get Xochitl so they might tell us together about Ocelotl.

  “It’s late,” Grandfather said. I didn’t think she would mind. “Mira, Angelita, que te lo cuenta.” A warning in his tone stopped me. “This Martín Ocelotl, and his twin—”

  “Twin?”

  “And his twin, Andrés Mixcoatl, led an Indian uprising. It began right here in these mountains.” The brothers were incarnations of the gods MirrorSmoke and FeatherSerpent, or so people here claimed. For this they fell afoul, Grandfather said, of a horror called the Inquisition and were finally condemned. Mixcoatl burned. “But Ocelotl …” he concluded mysteriously, “Ocelotl disappeared into the night.”

  He had his second wind. The firelight glowed softly on his face. Now there came tale after tale of golden cities and fiery mountains, blue hummingbirds and eagle knights, wizards and jaguars, curses and troths. Of the magic traps the Mexica wizards set for the Conquistadors, but who, not knowing Mexica magic, rode right on as if through gossamer.

  Through half-lidded eyes I saw Amanda’s eyes blinking, slow … close—flutter, stop. Then the threads unravelled and we were lofted up and up towards the mountains, Amanda and I, and softly stretched on sleep’s stone ledges. By hummingbirds.

  The next day we ran everywhere together, exploring. We scrambled up to the watchtower, and to our delight found a little bronze cannon, battered and so long out of use there was a nest in it. To the south, beyond the belfry of our chapel, faint blue smoke smudged up from the town. Beyond the house to the east bristled fields of maize, then what might be the grey-green of agave, and then a glimmer of water. From there, deep forest rose in ranks of pikes sharply up to the snow line. It felt like mid-morning, yet the sun had still not cleared the volcanoes. They were right there, right over us. That first day we must have stared up at them for an hour.

  We had come up to get a commanding (even superior) view over the house, towards which our eyes finally condescended. I kept the sketch I made during those early days when it all seemed so new. The firepit around which we had slept stood near the centre, and next to it a well. A wide, shady arcade ran right around the courtyard, except for the main portal on the eastern side, between the kitchen and the library. At the four corners, full rain barrels bulged beneath waterspouts set in the eaves. On the north, near the kitchen, was a tiled basin in the shape of a cross.

  The flower beds—roses, calla lilies, hyacinths—had run wild, and now nodded and buzzed and beamed along the colonnade from kitchen to dining room to what was now my bedroom, next to the watchtower steps at the northwest corner. From my bed, which Amanda and I had dragged under the window, I could see all but the tips of the volcanoes, so high were they, so close by.

  I had expected a hard fight from my sisters for that room. But María found the volcanoes oppressive; Josefa just shuddered to imagine the sight of them at night. So instead they made a great show of their maturity by choosing to share the only room left. I applauded this. And, yes, it was the largest—fractionally. To one side of them was our mother’s room, on the southwest corner next to the entrance to the chapel. To the other side was Grandfather’s room, in the southeast corner next to the library.

  The library, I resolved, would later be reconnoitred from every possible angle. Chins propped on our forearms, forearms on the sill, we had been kneeling on my bed under the window onto the courtyard.

  “But Amanda,” I said, “where do you and Xochita sleep?”

  She led me at a dead run past the dining room and into the kitchen: beyond it hung two hammocks in the pantry’s back corner. It seemed unprepossessing to me, cramped even. She was thrilled that she and Xochitl each had a window, and that the two afforded a cross-breeze (designed not for their pleasure but to keep the pantry cool and dry).

  I kept this last observation to myself but resolved to take the matter up with Grandfather. “Let it alone, Angel. Amanda is happy.”

&nb
sp; And so I did. There was so much else to do.

  Once we had settled in, the next order of business was to thwart the movement to put me in school. I had missed the first two months, and was certain to be made the butt of the cruellest pranks and jokes. Isabel surprised me by taking this seriously. Besides, I told Grandfather once she was out of earshot, there was not much chance of falling behind in only a year since apparently my classmates could not yet read. Here I let my head loll about like a boggled newborn, at which Grandfather laughed wheezily.

  “I’ve been reading for three years already, Abuelo, did you know that?” My average was a book a week, and lately more like two. So that made over two hundred now, and I began to recite them for him in alphabetical order. Thus was the matter quickly settled.

  And next fall was an eternity away….

  I was not quite as confident of my advantage as I let on. Through each siesta I read furiously while the others slept. Beside me, Grandfather snored his bliss for an hour in a hammock strung between the arcade’s columns before the library door. I sat at a small table, his hammock beside me, an armspan away. Under one window, on the inside table, was a chess set. Reaching through the wrought-iron bars we could have played, my imaginary opponent and I, like contented prisoners whiling away the years. But I had a library to conquer, book by book. And so at the little table crowding the door, I sat—stuck. For this was the threshold I had not yet won Isabel’s permission to cross.

  “I said no, Inés. The library is a man’s place. It is not for little girls too accustomed already to having their way.” She had said this not even looking down, with me trotting alongside her on the way to the paddocks. “I don’t care what he said. He spoils you.” She was splendid, I had to admit, striding out in the sun, tucking that thick chestnut hair under her sombrero. In her riding boots she was almost as tall as I remembered Father, taller than Abuelo. I hadn’t known anyone could cover so much ground just walking—it was a wonder she bothered with horses at all. She walked the way I talked—would she stop for a minute, wouldn’t she care to explain?—we could negotiate. She laughed, then. A laugh deep like a man’s. Warm. Brief. I couldn’t remember ever making her laugh. I would try to be funnier the next time. But she still didn’t stop or even look down.

  Neverthless, that day and the next and until she stopped bothering to reply, I got some inkling of her reasons. Women and books had no place in this country; a woman’s place was out in the world, in the fields and grain exchanges and stock markets, if she was prepared to fight for it. And if she wasn’t, she would be at the mercy of men all her life. Not all the wishing or fighting in the world put women in libraries.

  We would see about that. Time, I thought, was on my side. And since she had been so obliging about school, I laboured mightily at patience.

  In the meantime, Grandfather brought me out each day a heaping tray of books to choose from—and a fine, adult selection, too. Each afternoon he shuffled through that doorway, and in his face was the quiet pride of a baker with a tray. In just that way did he place the books before me.

  And through those days and weeks, it was as though I had broken open a vast garner. But I was no granary mouse. I ate like a calf, like a goat—everything at once. Herodotus, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Thucydides—here, at last I had reached the source of all learning. Our great poets, Lope de Vega and Góngora—the early Góngora, Grandfather stressed with a certain severity. Our Bible, of course, and now Juan de la Cruz† and his love lyrics to Christ.

  And tales—of hungry picaroons erring through the Spanish countryside. While reading Don Quixote, I woke mi abuelito in the Hammock of the Sacred Nap almost every afternoon to protest the cruelties of Cervantes, who, Grandfather conceded, had suffered sufficient indignities himself to know better.

  This is probably why, the day I reached for Homer’s Iliad, Grandfather placed his hand over mine. There was something we should talk about first. An attack by Apollo—¡el emboscada más cobarde!†—against Achilles’ noble friend Patroklos. Though Abuelo sketched out for me just the barest outlines of that craven blow to the back—and from a god—his voice grew husky and tottery under the burden of Apollo’s disgrace. So when the dark day again fell across those pages, I prodded his shoulder till he woke, and shared with him my outrage. No, Abuelo, you were right, this was not at all a thing for a god to do.

  For a week or two that first winter we puzzled together over a volume by an Italian, Pico della Mirandola, which I thought a marvellous sort of name. It was a treatise, Grandfather believed, on updating the hexachord to the octave, which he was very keen to read. This splendidly named musicus had written it in Latin, which my abuelo read easily. The trouble was that by inadvertence he’d purchased an Italian translation of an Italian who wrote in Latin.

  At one point, we had fairly run the gamut when Grandfather sounded a note not far from fury. “Ut!” he sputtered. “This … this is finally and completely enough!”

  I responded with a great severity of my own. “A terrible translation, no, Abuelo? That it should give two such scholars so much trouble?”

  At this he coughed and patted my hand. “Yes, Angelita, a bad translation. That must be so.”

  By then an eternity had translated itself into a year. It was autumn and time to enrol in school, which brought me crashing to earth. I sat—dazed, in a sort of horological horror—in the forecourt of the school, under the motto Charity, Chastity and Grace. Just inside, Grandfather was arguing that I should be placed if not with the teenagers then in the third year at the very lowest.

  Yes, don Pedro, but grandfathers were, after all, expected to think their little nietas† very precocious.“Más, fíad, señor, in our long experience with children.” Since this would be my first year, I must of course begin with the beginners, but—but—they, the reverend sister teachers, would know just how to bring me along at a satisfactory pace.

  The fourth week ended prematurely, on the Wednesday afternoon, though it began exactly as had the others, and that was the problem. With our ABCs. As ever, Sister Paula stood before the class and led us in the most maddening singsong sham of question and answer—this was the Socratic method she was playing with. How marvellous that we had somehow divined in under a month that A should stand for … Avocado! And were we sure? Oh yes, very.

  So stubby were her legs, and arms to match, that she was forever treading on her rosary and then dipping her head to check herself, as though the beads were slung not at her waist but round her neck. And how she exclaimed over our sham right answers. My mind was invaded by the sketch of a pullet—pacing and bobbing and rearing back to crow, and stuntedly flapping and clapping over our great successes.

  For weeks now, to quell the need to scream I would chant along under my breath. The chant ran on and on like this. Hard and quickly:

  A is for Aleph in Hebrew; it comes from Chaldaean. B is for Beta in Greek, a borrowing from Phoenician. C is for—can we name the capital of Chaldaea …?

  This question of the sorcerer’s passing through Sister Paula’s classroom that day, the precise wording of the hex I threw, has been taken up by those whose qualifications are beyond reproach. And I do not dispute that by the Wednesday of week four my ABCs had spiralled and ramified within me until I had perfected a whole new gamut. As an alternative to Sister Paula’s version, my solo began at M, for ‘mi,’ of course, and for ‘Mem’ in Hebrew …

  Well Mem is interesting. Does it not look to you like the horns of an owl? Which is after all the almost universal symbol of muerte y mortalidad.† Now, the Reverend Athanasius Kircher believes the alphabet is modelled after forms in nature, and yes, just like the hieroglyphs of Egypt—of which one of the clearest is—precisely, an owl! But a Mister Herodotus says a gentleman named Cadmus introduced the entire alphabet to Greece from Phoenicia. And we know the Phoenicians were mariners and?—no?—why, merchants too. Yet this Cadmus brought back not only our abecedario† but also the boustrophedon, the lovely flow of our script from left to rig
ht, and down and back again—much like the tilling of your father’s fields, is it not? And if we trace this now in ink, see all the little “m’s” lying on their sides—hmmm? Well, why not indeed?—maybe it was the same field in which Cadmus had sown the dragon’s teeth. The very teeth which then sprouted up as men, if memory serves. Yes as enemies, unfortunately. And the Greeks—well, yes, right after Cadmus’s funeral maybe, quien sabe—called this new marvel of the alphabet stoicheia. And surely felt it was minted expressly to convey stoicism—an invention the God of the Hebrews only imparted to Adam after the Fall. And here is the best part now: God still denied the stoicheia even to the seraphim, for after all—angels never had to sit in school with so many SIX-YEAR-OLDS.

  I did not go on to the letter N. Sister Paula was in such a flap of crossing herself that she had come within one stub pinion of her own miraculous assumption.

  My hexachord may not have run to exactly these words and notes that day, but whose childhood recollections are not coloured by the perceptions of others? Elders, adults like Sister Paula, should know to be more careful about exaggeration and its effects on children, and on the truly credulous. Her version of how the sorceress hexed her classroom has followed me for years, and it is greatly vexing that I can do so little against it.

  When Grandfather brought me home that day, he described for Isabel the little Inquisition the sisters had held before releasing me. He was scandalized that their chief concern should be whether the others had been infected by my polluted lips.

  “Infected?” he snorted. “Such a disease we should all hope to catch….”

  So that’s what an Inquisition was. To calm Grandfather I told him I thought it might have been much worse. Still, this idea of pollution, infection, was unsettling. Just from my being near the younger girls? I was not so very different. I was good with facts, never forgot what things were or where they came from, and sometimes grasped even the whys. But I knew so little about how things were, how they felt.