Hunger's Brides (10 page)

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.

And in my scrawl I signed,

A Junta I!
†
¹¹

T
hough 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 Castilian
¹²
and I a line in Nahuatl. This one was for Xochitl.

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 …

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….