Hunger's Brides Read online

  (and who if not ‘I’)

  the anagram of a ‘mightier cry!?’…10

  And in my scrawl I signed,

  A Junta I!†11

  †sausage

  †sometimes translated as Necessity

  †‘a given, a datum, a dare’—Spanish synonyms for ‘die’

  †anagram for Juanita

  TROUT

  Though I might find the wizardry of poetry a very fine thing, it had not yet spelled my entrance to the library. Eventually I grasped that I was jeopardizing a territorial agreement, delicately arrived at, wherein Grandfather had ceded to his daughter full sovereignty over the hacienda in exchange for remaining in perpetuity the library’s uncontested patriarch and sole subject. What was extraordinary in this was that it appeared to have been arrived at in complete silence. As though a stern Jehovah had chiselled—neatly, so even a child could read—the new order onto tablets for us. No one was to enter there but he, not even to dust or tidy. Inwardly I could mock the rule, but for a time the silence cowed me.

  Adults were becoming mystifying, more abstruse and difficult to read than any book. My father had been mystery itself, and Isabel was always elementally Isabel, but there was now Xochita and even Abuelo.

  As in the case of our game of being twins: The morning after our arrival in Panoayan, Amanda and I’d swooped through the courtyard—PolishedEye and NibbleTooth, Ocelotl and Mixcoatl—shouting, “Mellizas, mellizas! Cocoas, cocoas!”† It was a joke no one else appreciated, but for us it was not mirth that made us laugh so, but rather purest delight. Xochitl told us to hush, which was startling enough. Around Isabel we never did much shouting, but when I caught sight of Grandfather glaring darkly at us—a thing I’d never seen him do—we fell silent. Which only made me all the more determined to make them see it one day for themselves, for instinctively I felt that anything that could give us so much joy must be true in some way more essential than fact.

  Sometimes it seemed the adults barely talked of anything consequential at all, except to us or through us, or in glares. Here we had been endowed (some of us prodigally) with speech, and yet they insisted on making everyone around them read the garble in their silences. Why wasn’t Amanda allowed to sit with us around the firepit? Xochitl would not say whose idea it had been—only that she didn’t want Amanda ‘bumblebeeing around.’ And then there was school. No one had asked, let alone insisted, that Amanda go to school. This troubled me more than I let on, even to her. Some shape was sleeping there, something mute I did not want to disturb—during my month at school I’d found that what I missed most, felt most in danger of losing, was not the library at all. It was Amanda. The day Abuelo brought me home from Sister Paula’s class, I swore a sacred oath that Amanda and I would make a school together in the fields and woods and hills. And I would tell her every little thing that was said at the firepit. As for the library, each day we would take with us one of the books I happened to be reading.

  We always stayed out till the very last minute, till they took to ringing the chapel bell to call us in to lunch. When we did come in, it was through the kitchen, where we drank enormous quantities of cordials made from horchata, or beet, or tamarind, or hibiscus. After lunch Amanda would stay with Xochitl, while I went on to the little table outside the library door. There I would begin to read, and the pain of separation ebbed so quickly I had barely the time to feel guilty over it.

  But each morning I awoke anxious to find her again. Days began early—often before dawn, with Amanda in my bedroom doorway, shifting her weight impatiently from foot to foot. We would stand a minute in the gathering light, nose to nose, knee to knee—and lock our hands hard, just for an instant. Then it was a sprint (I lost, I always lost) across the flagstones—icy under our bare soles—and up to the watchtower.

  First we checked the bird’s nest in the cannon barrel for eggs. But that year there was only the most delicate little cup of grass lined with blue-green down. Where had its architects gone? Next we snuggled under an old horse blanket up there that Father had used with the yearlings. By flapping it and waving it under their noses, he would gradually teach them not to shy. I was sure it still smelled of horses.

  We waited.

  On a clear morning it is as though the sun rising far to the east chisels WhiteLady’s fall from a block of purest indigo. Head thrown back—chin upthrust—soft heave of breast—knees demure … I squinted up to see how a true poet would see her. Though SmokingStone was more spectacular, its white flint tip edged in keen fire, she was the one we watched, right above us.

  The very instant the last pale rose had drained from El Popo’s cone, we slapped and clattered barefoot down to the kitchen to find Xochitl grinding corn for tortillas. Soon we waited even that long only on the clearest mornings, for we were dawn’s cognoscentae now. If the sky was at all cloudy, we were in the kitchen early enough to help with the cooking fire. Once the flames licked up, Amanda and I each took a kindling stick and with a little tremble of fire lit the lamps. Next we huffed and heaved in an armload of firewood, never forgetting to check the woodpile for scorpions first. Now we made a great show of helping Xochitl with the tortillas, so she might be free to make for us—Xochita, hurry please—a breakfast basket to take out into the fields.

  We might go north then, through the orchards, or south past the paddocks. Very rarely west to the road. But almost always these days east through the cornfields, out along the river and past the little plot of maguey cactus. Though now it grew wild, it had been planted, Xochitl said, long before Cortés camped there—yes, right there—safe on open ground by the river. It is from this place that Panoayan takes its name: Place of Maguey by Water. That first night at the firepit Grandfather had been so excited to hear this, but when I made to call Xochitl out of the kitchen, I got another of those silences that made me—if just for a minute—never want to tell him anything again. But I couldn’t stay quiet long. I was beginning to tell my own stories by the fire, constructed of the countless things I’d learned that day in the fields—rhymes and songs and plants and dances with Amanda. She had only to go through a dance once to remember it. From her mother, Amanda had to learn the dances mostly by ear—Xochitl’s hip let her do little more than talk Amanda through the steps. She had the most wonderful grace with a gesture—the turn of a wrist, the tilt of her head. Amanda didn’t talk much, at least compared with me. She didn’t run on and on. She was quick with a story she’d learned, or a riddle. Dance was her great talent, but where she spoke most clearly was in the secret language of gifts….

  During a month of nights she made us each a heavy cotton satchel for the plants and flowers and rocks we collected in the woods. On each bag she had beaded a rabbit, mine green, hers blue. Some nights a flower on my pillow. Little dolls and polished stones, abandoned bird’s nests—once, crickets in a cup.

  A gift could be like a vision, a conjury delicate as glass. A gesture was like a magical symbol, like the corn, or a crown, but not stuck to an old hairpiece—a gesture was alive. And even, a little dangerous. Had I yet written a single poem like that?

  All I knew were things from books. There were Grandfather’s legends, but few new ones anymore. He seemed not to tell so many these days. Amanda did like the ones I made up. This intrigued her, that stories were not just learned but invented. And if I helped a bit, we could even write little songs together. To make it more interesting, she would have to find a line in Castilian12 and I a line in Nahuatl. This one was for Xochitl.

  There are diamonds in the grass.

  There are serpents in the clouds.

  In the earth are halls of jade,

  and feathers in the temple.13

  The next morning we recited it for her, and flushed with our great success went back to write another. For our reading and our poetry there was a shady place just beyond the cornfields, which were then in full bloom. It was like wading through the blue of the open sea, and we were giants whose feet touched bottom. A strip of trees ran between
the corn and the plot of maguey, and there we would sit just above where the river ran closest. One of Abuelo’s windmills perched on the riverbank near us, another at the far end of the field. Carrying out over the river and the cactus, the view to the mountains was clear and unbroken. After two years it still was hard not to stare at them.

  To get us started I read her a page of verse I had laboured over that night. It began …

  In soft echoes are heard,

  the bird;

  in flowing waters that sing,

  the spring;

  in phrases’ sweet shower,

  the flower;

  in green-throated salute,

  the shoot …14

  I told her I had written it for her. What I meant was that I was giving it to her. She sat blinking at me for a moment. And then, as was our custom, she gave me something in return. She announced she was to learn to be a midwife, as her mother had been. The song she sang so gravely then she could not have learned overnight. I was struck by what a serious and grown-up affair this was, and that my tall swift twin was almost a grown-up too. And if I didn’t try very, very hard, I would never keep up with her….

  My beloved child, my precious one,

  here are the precepts, the principles

  your father, your mother, Yohualtecutli, Yohualticitl, have laid down.

  From your body, the middle of your body, I remove, I cut the

  umbilical cord.

  Know this, understand this:

  Your home is not here.

  You are the eagle, you are the jaguar,

  you are the precious scarlet bird,

  you are the precious golden bird of Tloque Nahuaque;†

  you are his serpent, you are his bird.

  Only your nest is here.

  Here you only break out of your shell,

  here you only arrive, you only alight,

  here you only come into the world.

  Here like a plant, you sprout, you burst into bloom, you blossom.

  Here like a fragment struck from a stone, chipped from a stone, you are born.

  Here you only have your cradle, your blanket, your pillow where you

  lay your head.

  This is only the place of arrival.

  Where you belong is elsewhere:

  You are pledged, you are promised, you are sent to the field of battle.

  War is your destiny, your calling.

  You shall provide drink,

  you shall provide food,

  you shall provide nourishment for the Sun, for the Lord of the Earth.

  Your true home, your domain, your patrimony is the House of the

  Sun in heaven where you shall shout the praises of, where you shall

  amuse, the Everlastingly Resplendent One.

  Perhaps you shall merit, perhaps you shall earn,

  death by the obsidian knife in battle,

  death by the obsidian knife in sacrifice …15

  It was terrifying, and beautiful, like Aeschylus. This was the song for the newborn boy. The midwife first removes the cord. She takes the afterbirth and buries it in the earth in a corner of the house. She lays the cord out to dry in the sun. Later, if the boy is a warrior, he will carry it with him onto the field of battle. And if he falls it will be buried there.

  I asked her the song for a girl. But Xochitl had said Amanda was not yet ready to learn it.

  Amanda gave more, but that wasn’t why I began to feel guilty. Jealousy I’d felt before. Of losing what I had. I’d felt it sometimes when Isabel would call Grandfather away from me for some reason. But this was new, this was envy…. The things Amanda could share with me seemed so much finer than mine—even poetry now. The only other thing I had left to offer was teaching Amanda to read. But books were hard—she had better understand that. Harder still was reading aloud before an auditor so very stern of late. I had been making her read Plutarch. Plutarch is a Greek who wrote a lot about Greece, which I had been trying so very patiently to teach her about. Plutarch is hard, even in Castilian. (And I was in no mood now to tell her how much trouble he had had learning to read Latin.)

  There was a passage she kept stumbling over, right at the bottom of the page. Over and over, trying harder and harder to please me, her eyes almost as round and wide, for once, as mine. “No, don’t look at me—read—no, you’re trying too hard.” She was almost nine. I was so frustrated because something delightful awaited, if only we could reach the top of the very next page. I had made a crown for her to wear, to mark the end of this difficult and profound and beautiful passage. And the crown was a very grand gesture—a wizardly conjury of my own, if she would only, please, get there.

  “I know the names are Greek, but if you can’t say ‘Boeotia,’† how are we ever to read Hesiod?” It was as though she didn’t even understand anymore what was coming out of her mouth. Did she?

  “Nympheutria—anakalypteria16—tell me, Amanda: which is the bride’s attendant, which is the unveiling gift?”

  Would I have known, had I not just read it myself the night before? Well, today was not the day, either, for telling her I had no Greek at all.

  “No, Amanda. Nympheutria! That’s what they’d call you, if I were getting married. The unveiling thing is the—oh never mind, the other one.”

  Amanda cried easily. Silently, no sobs. Her neat head bent; then her eyes just gushed. She was quick to tears of tenderness, quick to tears of pity, or love—watching them netted one day like bright fish in her soft black hair was a moment of fascination. But she would never, ever be made to cry by something like this.

  Over her face had fallen a mask of cold wood. How square the chin, how pale the lips, how very hard the wood.

  It was the first day in two years I walked home alone.

  As I approached the house, I saw two horsemen down by the paddocks and between them a long-horned black bull. It was almost as tall as the horses themselves and chafing at the tight tethers—two ropes bound to each rider’s pommel. Isabel was sitting on the top rail of the corral and Abuelo had forgone his nap to stand with her and watch. The bull had been brought from Chimalhuacan. “Is he ours now?” I asked.

  Isabel surprised me by answering first. “No, only for a week or two.”

  The bulls I’d seen were sullen, sluggish things. Freed of its tethers, this one moved swiftly around the corral, then stopped to hook one of its horns—lightly, now left, now right—against an upright, as if to test the firmness of its anchor. The older horseman glanced at Isabel then. The younger one had been stealing glances at her for a while. After a minute she climbed down and called to one of the workers to bring poles for braces.

  Abuelo had held his silence until now. “This one,” he told me proudly, first glancing at his daughter, “would be worthy of the finest corridas of Spain, not these butcheries here. True, the calves will be a little wild….”

  Just before dawn I awoke—and there she was, as always. But now Amanda waved over me a large white square of fine muslin, the sort Xochitl used for squeezing water from curd.

  “Is this a truce?” Friends such as I did not deserve peace offerings.

  “No, Ixpetz—I thought you would guess. Mother didn’t know either. Look—now see? It’s a veil.”

  Yes, Amanda, I saw. I did see at last.

  We slipped out through the kitchen without even waiting for Xochitl to put food in our satchels.

  On our way out to the fields, we went by the corral. Seeing us, the new arrival began to cut powerfully, quickly, back and forth across the enclosure. The bull still looked as if it could come right through the braced fence—or even over—if it saw something it wanted.

  Amanda had already started towards our reading place. She hesitated, seemed about to say something, but then quietly came with me. As we picked flowers, she told me a little more of what she’d learned about midwifery from Xochitl. As the morning wore on, she grew more distracted. Soon it would be time to go in for lunch. She led me back to the shady spot past the
cornfield. We sat. She was quiet, her eyes downcast. We sat. She looked up at me. Finally she said, “Have you given up?”

  What an idiot I was—of course that’s what she would think. I dug Plutarch out from under all that day’s flowers and the wilted ones farther down. She must have seen my relief. She read, and for the first time in a while I was not stern at all. And she read beautifully, the whole of the lovely passage I had marked, which ends

  After veiling the bride they put on her head a crown of asparagus, for this plant yields the sweetest fruit from the harshest thorns …17

  “The veil!” she said, delighted. “Wait …” She started digging in her own satchel for the muslin. “Wait, wait, I’ll be your attendant, your … Nympheutria! Was that right?” She had closed her eyes to concentrate and opening them, looked up, the question in her eyes.

  But as she opened them she saw that I, for once, had been the quicker. The crown was in my hands. It did look strange, I supposed. We didn’t have asparagus, so I had taken agave spikes, cut them into long triangles and woven them into a slim crown. It was the best I could do. I had wanted nopal.†

  She looked at it a long while. “It’s for you,” I said. She nodded. She had understood all right. “Let me be your attendant for once, NibbleTooth.”

  And I was. We plaited her hair. She wore a muslin veil, and an almost-asparagus crown. And I thought the bride, at her unveiling, very beautiful.

  As I turned her around and pulled back her veil, her big almond eyes were full and danced like the light in a birdbath.

  We missed lunch. As the bell tolled on, we chattered like urracas about crowns. “In Greece this could have been a laurel crown, for great feats of letters. You can read now, Amanda, really read. Plutarch is hard—but good, no?” The Greeks used crowns for everything. The crown of obsidion for generals raising sieges. “And no Greek woman not a virgin would be caught dead without her headpiece, also a kind of crown, like this—”

  With my hands I showed her how it was—like a plane of holiness settled over the brow. Was it not like a rising into loveliness? Not quite an ascent into the sky but a surfacing …