Hunger's Brides Read online

  And then, there were the books Grandfather had not let me see.

  †transept

  †the Red and Black, the ancient ways, ‘knowledge and death,’ and the insignia of the keeper of its books

  †Nahuatl metaphor for the Conquest

  †St. John of the Cross (canonized 1726)

  †the most cowardly ambush

  †granddaughters

  †death and mortality

  †Spanish for the ABCs and also for the primer that teaches them

  ANAGRAMS

  The nuns had sent up a whirlwind of prayer as Grandfather escorted me home from school. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee … Virgin serene, holy, pure and immaculate …7 Or so I recall, if not to the letter. Well, I might be different from the others in some ways, even if I was a little confused about how, but I wasn’t polluted and I wasn’t infected. Abuelo promised me I was not confused about that.

  And I’d hardly begun to appreciate all the things the other children and I shared. They had a mother, for instance. And like me, they were subject to the arbitrary exercise of her power. I had won the good sisters’ agreement to an early matriculation, only to discover I was still denied access to Abuelo’s library.

  “If you’re quitting school,” said Isabel, “it’s because you’re learning enough here. Are you or are you not learning enough here?”

  Not that the argument was flawless. But what impressed me was that she had bothered to reason with me at all. And she didn’t just sail off either, as if to say she had more important things to do than remonstrate with someone my size. She stood planted there, and under those long arching brows her black eyes beheld me evenly. This was important enough to settle here and now. What unnerved me was that I knew I had not yet understood why. She never went into the library. And as she stood facing me down, whatever her reason, it felt bigger than I was.

  I flinched. Retreated. Gave way to her—yet again.

  But there were other arrangements to try and titles to sample, laid out on Grandfather’s book trays. Lycophron and Pythagoras; commentaries on the Cabbalists and their codes, on Galileo and other such ‘moonstarers.’ And, especially now, novels: tempting picarescas of young children running away from cruel mothers, of spurned knights throwing rings into reflecting wells, of wrongly accused brides vindicating their honour before the pitiful, shamed accusers, whom it took little effort to picture wearing nuns’ habits….

  Sometimes I would close my eyes and choose at random from Grandfather’s book tray. Once my hand fell upon a manual on the making of suits of armour, which, when ornamented with jewels and pearls and precious metals, Grandfather said were among the most beautiful things ever fashioned by man’s ingenuity or in his image. Among the great European armourers were the Colmans and the legendary Jacobi Topf. So icily beautiful were his designs, I had soon devoured the manual front to back.

  How darkly fastidious, these black arts—all the intricacies in the fluting, the roped and scalloped edges, the treatment of the surfaces—acid-etched and russeted, blued and blacked. For the warhorse, the buff armour of ox hide, and the chanfrons and crinnets without which its lovely head might be severed at a single blow of an obsidian axe. So impressed were the Conquistadors with the quilted Mexican armour, they adopted it themselves. Though they did still cling to the kite-shaped bucklers as if to the thread on which swung their lives.

  Yet nothing prepared me for the annihilation of Melos.

  Did Grandfather not see me reading Thucydides? How could anyone forget this, Abuelo least of all. Yet he had forgotten, as he was beginning to do, as I should have seen if I had been attentive enough to notice. Then he did remember. He sat with me for over an hour, at first patting me awkwardly on the shoulder, then pressing his forehead to mine.

  These are old stories of course, but who among us may claim never to have been wounded by one such as this, and a little changed inside? It is that chapter in The Peloponnesian War when the mighty Athenian navy stops at the small island of Melos to dictate terms. Terms the Melians so gracefully contest in their final hours.

  Each fine point, they turn this way and that, pleasantly—on both sides, for the Athenian envoy too is a man of high reason. They are all men like Thucydides, who stood by and watched, and was once an admiral himself. The fine, precise minds, the superb learning, these precious things they shared.

  “And all for what?” I asked Abuelo angrily. But I felt confusion too, that a book by a historian two thousand years dead could loose such a flood of feelings in me—wonder, fury and grief; the channels scored then have never quite silted in. I know that chapter as though I’d written it, as the one who watched them fall.

  ATHENS: You know and we know, as practical men, that the question of justice arises only between parties equal in strength, and that the strong do what they can, and the weak submit.

  MELOS: As you ignore justice and have made self-interest the basis of discussion, we must take the same ground, and we say that in our opinion it is in your interest to maintain a principle which is for the good of all—that anyone in danger should have just and equitable treatment and any advantage, even if not strictly his due, which he can secure by persuasion. This is your interest as much as ours, for your own fall would involve you in a crushing punishment that would be a lesson to the world.

  ATHENS: Leave that danger to us to face…. We wish you to become our subjects with least trouble to ourselves, and we would like you to survive, in our interests as well as your own.

  MELOS: It may be your interest to be our masters: how can it be ours to be your slaves?

  ATHENS: By submitting you would avoid a terrible fate, and we should gain by not destroying you.

  MELOS: Would you not agree to an arrangement under which we should keep out of the war, and be your friends instead of your enemies, but neutral?

  ATHENS: No: your hostility injures us less than your friendship. That, to our subjects, is an illustration of weakness, while your hatred exhibits our power….

  MELOS: Surely then, if you are ready to risk so much to maintain your empire, and the enslaved peoples so much to escape from it, it would be criminal cowardice in us, who are still free, not to take any and every measure before submitting to slavery? … We trust that Heaven will not allow us to be worsted by Fortune, for in this quarrel we are right and you are wrong….8

  Thus spoke the last Melian emissary, before every man of Melos was slaughtered, every woman and child sold into bondage. Before every stone sacred to Melos was pulled to the ground. It was terrible—stupid and pitiless, the exercise of beautiful minds in a mindless, fatal cause. And then for trusting to heaven, for their faith in right, the Melians are held up to the scorn of all practical men. What real choice was left them? In the left hand, Athens holds slavery and criminal cowardice. In the right, annihilation.

  “Yes, you are right, Angel, the Melians were very reasonable. But they were not realistic. There is no shame in surrender to a greatly superior force, or to Fortune, or God. There can be a kind of grace in this. Pericles saw this. Moctezuma saw….”

  I was sitting in the same chair as always, looking towards the library door, with the kitchen at my back. He had dragged the other chair to sit beside me now, so as to be able to look into my eyes and reason with me. His thin old leg, though not quite touching, felt warm next to mine. My face was hidden in my hands. I knew it was childish to cry like this. Gently he coaxed them down to the table, letting his big bony hand rest lightly across my wrists.

  “But Socrates was an Athenian too, wasn’t he, Abuelo? What about Plato’s Republic—he proved to Thrasymachus that honour was necessary even among thieves. Socrates proved it.”

  “Yes. Yes he did. And resoundingly. But the Athenians had not read it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, Angelina, it would not be written for thirty more years.”

  “But Socrates was alive, he was a teacher. He and Thucydides both lived in Athens.”

&n
bsp; “It may be they never met.”

  “How big was Athens, then—bigger than Tenochtitlan?”

  “No, no.”

  “Bigger than Mexico City now, or Seville?”

  “Even smaller.”

  “Then how …?”

  They had to know each other. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Socrates, Pericles, Thucydides. These were Grandfather’s heroes. They were Athens. How could they have become great all alone, all together, all at the same time? No. They influenced, learned from one another, as I learned from Abuelo. Athens made them, but they made each other great. Or else what was a city for? On Melos, Thucydides had somehow failed Athens. I sensed this, I knew this. But if he and Socrates had never had the chance to meet, or walk together, or know each other’s hearts, then I must feel that their city had failed them first.

  I could not have expressed it then, I was so hurt and shocked by something in it. Troubling enough that the envoys were so like-minded, so gracious. It would take years to understand, of course—yet how much more disturbing that in their golden age they were so much like us in ours. I wasn’t ready to accept that they truly felt as we feel, but they spoke and thought like the very finest of us. This was not some wild-bearded tribe in Canaan—they could have been sitting at our table. Graciously, amiably Terrible things happened, I knew. Earthquakes, floods … But here was the first, most terrible sense of a wrongness in the machinery of the world. A thing out of true. A bent cog that might be turning now in me.

  The most bloodthirsty general of all the Tartars could have given the order to exterminate the Melians. But this was Thucydides, a stratēgos, one of the Ten. This was no earthquake, no eruption, no flood, such as we had here in this valley—our volcanoes were Necessity. This was only strategy. Navies do not inspire loyalty, though they might command it….

  “It was the greatness of Athens that inspired the states to follow her, wasn’t it Abuelo?”

  As I spoke, I kept my head bowed, ashamed of my hot, sticky face. I watched instead Grandfather’s big hand where it lay over my wrists. Of vague surprise was that such a knobby, knuckly hand as his should be as pale as my wrists and palms. The skin was faintly spotted like an old pelt, and between the knuckles a pale, purplish-blue. The knuckle and index finger bulged out beyond the normal width, as if the finger of a bigger hand were sewn on and wrapped in a dressing. Much of the time his hand hovered a little, trembling, a soft patting that only occasionally brushed my skin—an ungainly bird uncertain where to light.

  One thing above all others had badly shaken me. Even though Thucydides did not give that order, he would still have counselled it. Even if he did not counsel it, he had given orders like it during his own time as an admiral. He knew. Yet by the time he wrote, so many years later, he had seen in that hour not just the end of all that was Melos: for by then the great poets, the beautiful minds, were dead and Athens was broken. Euripedes in 406, Sophocles in 405. Socrates executed in 399, and Thucydides himself soon to be assassinated. Athens killed them both in a year, but not before he had seen his failure. He wrote with the same unsparing eyes, even then.

  In all that time, he had still not learned mercy, even toward himself.

  I saw an old man seeing this in exile, who had still not surrendered to grace, made peace with his lack of charity, and who used it to wound himself, knowingly. Mercilessly. And so wounded us.

  “He knew,” I blubbered out. But for the first time in my life, words had failed me. I had not cried like this since my father left. “Abuelo, he knew it was wrong. He was—and still he didn’t feel sorry.”

  Isabel had stopped on the way to the kitchen. She stood just behind Grandfather and asked what the fuss was about.

  “Thucydides,” he mumbled.

  From the corner of my eye, I could see her shake her head. “I told you, the child is too young.” Then she walked swiftly past us to the kitchen.

  “Then I am too, Isabel,” he called after her. “Too young.”

  I had been staring at that pale salchicha† of a finger and trying not to look up at her. I fancied I saw a haplessness in it … like a little elephant trunk, that blank expanse just below the elephant’s eyes where the trunk seems grafted on.

  Grandfather’s tone is what finally made me look up at him. His face was turned towards the light out in the courtyard. His head was tipped a little back, as if to keep the world from spilling from the delicate chalices of his eyes. I had never seen an adult cry, or even near to it. Amanda cried easily. Her chin would pull her upper lip down, which got all long over her teeth and rolled under them a little. This wasn’t like that at all. It was quiet, and still.

  After a moment he turned to me that big face of a medieval lion. I must not blame my mother, he said. I must not, but I did. There was something now I must never mention to anyone. Did I swear? he asked. His eyes were so beautiful then, green as wet grass. I’d have promised anything.

  “Your mother has never learned to read.”

  “But … Abuelo …”

  This seemed incredible. This was utterly mystifying. She was intelligent—that much I knew.

  “Yes, Angelita, very intelligent. You are right. Something in the letters made her furious—physically sick, and furious. We tried for years. She jumbled everything. It was the most painful thing between us. Some of the worst moments of her life were at that desk in there. So try, señorita, to be more understanding. And a little thankful for what you have.”

  I have returned to Melos and Thucydides a dozen times at least since that day. And each time they reveal something new to me. The war ended in the defeat of Athens, and as the Melian envoy had foreseen, her fall served as a lesson to the world. For if right is only a question between equals, so also is loyalty. In the hour when Fortune ever so lightly tips the scales to Sparta, the confederacy under Athens must dissolve as if built upon a pedestal of sugar. The Spartan confederacy had held precisely when the Athenian did not: when the scales were tipped against them; whereas Athens sued for peace at the first reversal. Six years after that, they violated, being practical men, the terms and principles of the treaty they had asked for. In 404 they surrendered completely. Sparta broke Athens, and the war broke Greece.

  I have read the Athenian poets many times since then. I believe that the Athenian emissary, a practical man, was wrong about loyalty and right, and wrong about the message sparing Melos would have sent the confederate states. For already the greatest poets and dramatists of Athens had prepared the states to follow her in a show of mercy to Melos. Homer, they would have followed precisely for love of honour. Euripedes, in repugnance for savagery. Aristophanes, towards the pleasures of peace. Aeschylus, through the awe of suffering.9 Most of all they would have followed Sophocles, who was already eighty, and had shown all Greece that to know the mind of any god, most especially Ananke,† was to earn her undying hatred.

  The Melians insisted on seeing right; Thucydides refused to see things as they might be. Athens betrayed herself by surrendering to expediency; Thucydides betrayed her by making it pass for necessity. He had made his sacrifices to an impostor. This is what I felt but could not find the words to say. Thucydides, more than anyone else except perhaps Grandfather, made a poet of me. How furious I was with him, so clear-eyed when I was not, so unsentimental where I could not be. So bent was he on opposing the Iliad’s cant of honour and glory—he would be the one to unmask it; he, for one, would not be gulled.

  It seemed to me that day he was a kind of priest, with terrible, clear eyes. Eyes that had seen plagues and holocausts and exile, eyes that had watched Athens die and, themselves dying, had calmly watched his own executioner smile….

  So, in truth, I was not so very different from any child in each of the ages since the last ABCs were taught on Melos. After the last die had been shaken loose from the last pedestal, after the last Melian bone had been made dice, we learned our ABCs from Athens. Yes, we had learned also in the infancy of the world, but Athens was our first school.

  To
each generation since, the little building blocks, the dies, the primers.

  And since that day at the little table outside Grandfather’s library, I have had the most maddening time keeping it all straight: when a die is cast, is it to Fortune, or in the mould of Necessity? Keeping straight what came first, the roll of chance or the press of the stamp. And how it is that to set the dice upon someone is to oppress and tyrannize; and if it is our fate or only ill fortune to worship miscalculation and ignorance as imperatives.

  Must this now forever be—un dado, un datum, un desafio?† Is it such good strategy to call these things pragmatism? And who are these pragmatists and men of action who follow might as noun, but will not hear of it as verb?

  What is that moment in which a world conceives its own end? When its inner poetry gives way to prose. That must be what a poet is, I thought, what poets do. And this was another way for a child, not quite so young thereafter, to reverse the losses of that day. Of course these were childish things—of letters and blocks, and wizards and puzzles. But if priests had words and wizards had visions, poets must be wizards with words.

  Real poets would never just find the might in is, but seek their being in ‘might.’ To make a place for vision here, for words of might—this seemed a fine thing then to do.

  Here was the lesson Melos foresaw in Athens’ fall, but since Thucydides we had lost the heart of it. This loss has been like a flaw pressed into a die, an error in type, that reproduces itself—inked and re-inked for each new run of primers. It is as one letter disfigured in the press, a die miscast by hazard so that never in the hundred generations since Melos have we read ‘mercy’ spelled aright.

  Not long after, I sat down to be a poet.

  Yet in ‘mercy?’ and ‘right!’ combined,

  but for a miscast die, might one not rightly find