Hunger's Brides (148 page)

It is only a gesture.

I may never hear the exact charges I am convicted of, but heresy is not always punishable by death—the unrepentant are. A statement of error: brief, no longer than a sentence. If I cannot resolve this, compose it—now, in my mind—the choice will be made and the sentence written for me. The outcome is not in doubt. And if I am to find a way forward, I can only hope I find it in choosing to look back. For if it is to some fable of truth itself that I still cling, or to a sentence spelling ruin in a child's anagram, if I am to rewrite it, there is one journey to be made again, to a place where the paths begin and to a moment where they intersect.

On the landing above the canal Uncle Juan said good-bye and sent his respects to my mother. I did not trust myself to answer. He apologized for María and Magda, asked when I would be returning. I did not know how long it would be. The boatman pushed off. We were soon out of the canals and out on the lake. Flotsam and deadheads bobbed at the surface. Most of the streams and rivers feeding the lake had been in flood. The sun was briefly out, and hot, thinning the mists that lay in the valleys. I had hardly slept the night before, and through drowsy lids thought I saw a seal ahead of the canoe. Then two, which could not of course be seals. Two … three … six … The canoe surged powerfully under me with each paddle stroke. The sun was warm. Into my mind swam the sea calves of Proteus and among them Menelaus, disguised in sealskins on the shore of Egypt. Homecomings … how long had he been away from Sparta, and Odysseus from Ithaca? Little shards of sun glinted on the water.

It was mid-morning of the second day as we entered the highest valley. The lower slopes were shrouded in a drab mist—shifting, softening landmarks. The young ox driver grew more animated, asked a hundred questions. He had never been so close to the mountains. As we turned off the main road onto the track running up to the hacienda I looked back, though I knew there were no other turn-offs to mistake ours for. And yet while the landscape had seemed changed, it began to seem as though the
changes its tenants had made had somehow never taken. There were no workers in the orchards. Close beside the road the plots of tomato and squash had been ploughed under and no one worked there.

We rolled over the brook and past the sentry box. The black cedar shingles on the house faintly glowed with pale green moss. Around back, the cart pulled to a stop. The mist had begun to clear. The cone of Popocatepetl floated above the earth upon a plane of white billows stretching south. In the calm air a white plume of steam went up as if pouring through an inverted funnel, an upturned hourglass of cloud. Fresh snow gleamed in the sun like fields of white obsidian. I got down, stiff, hesitant….

Up on those slopes is a place with a waterfall, and a rooster tail of water bursting from a dry rock face. But for all its beauty it is not Ixayac I would give the most to visit again for an hour, nor even our library, but a shady spot at the base of a giant cedar among the pines. On the banks of the river Panoya, between the cornfield and the plot of maguey. In hindsight it is not always from the highest point that one sees farthest. From here one sees the orchards and the green rows of vegetables, the house itself with its watchtower and chapel, the corrals and the mountains, the windmills, and in the mind's eye at least, the trout pool and the waterfalls of Ixayac.

And here, next to the granite cross, was a place in which to have solved some of the mysteries that had always surrounded me. And who is to say that my destiny—a butterfly pursued as by a toddler—would not have altered its course? Solving one of these at eleven I might have refused to leave my real and true half-sister in Panoayan and, like my mother, never left for Mexico in spite of all my plans. Solving it at fifteen, when I returned to find Amanda gone, I might have set out to pursue her through the wilds of the New World as the nun-ensign would surely have done.

But for clues, it is to the objects spread before me in the shade of that tree I look now, more carefully than at fifteen when in my distraction I felt more than saw them. Corncob doll. Bird's nest lined with a blue-green down. Cornflower crown, pressed between the leaves of an old book. The beginnings of my first collection. They were never mementoes, nor did that collection, so much grown, ever serve me in this way. It is closer to the truth to say that I had carried them back home from Mexico as keepsakes, or as evidence against an accusation, though I cannot
say what charge I most feared—of having forsaken the past, perhaps, or of emptiness itself. I had
not
forgotten, but had carried them away precisely so I would not have to remember.

Here it is tempting to see so many lines converging and patterns laid. A wedding tree and a turtle pail, a shady spot in which to sit with Amanda, and to read from Ecclesiastes and the poet Manrique, on the day I first met Magda.

Of Necessity, the imagination of the ancient Greeks fashioned a net, of Fate, a thread. Then what is Destiny?—of the many riddles I'd set myself as a child, this was one of the earliest. And to this, I did arrive at a solution of sorts. If fate is a thread, necessity a net, then a destiny must be found in the weave, in the gaps between. So it seems I have not come so very far since then. It would be better to remember this from now on. Had I done so earlier, it might have come to me why I found Gutiérrez sympathetic from the start—though the rodent chin was but the faintest hint, for in fact my grandfather's chin was quite prominent. But each had a habit when amused of scratching at the beard below it, and Abuelo's had once, very long ago, been more red than grey. And if any of what Magda has said is true, there were other things too that might have occurred to me, about my own family, the secrecy in which my uncle's parents lived, my grandfather's friendship with them; and to ask what my mother and María knew about the secret poetry of his heart, and the language it was written in.

So if anything was to prove fateful, it was my resolution, leaving Panoayan, never again to look back, at the age of fifteen.

So many fine reasons I had found for this in the works of the famous poets and philosophers.
Life is an ever-living fire kindling in measures, being extinguished in measures
. Heraclitus. Nothing lasts, says the poet Manrique, and all our lives flow to the sea that is death, such that we may wonder if the past ever was. But it was the story of the poet Orpheus that exerted the decisive influence, for it was precisely by looking back that he had lost the one thing most precious to him.

Here. If there is an answer, still some way out, it is here.

The convent chaplain's visit this morning brings it back, my doubts, how frail my defences and all my resolutions seem. He had gone to the cathedral for me, to learn what he could about the new developments Bishop Maldonado had warned of. A warning now confirmed. It continues to be
harder with friends, harder to pretend. After Vespers Antonia comes into my room and asks me to go for a walk with her. It is so hot, she says casually. It
is
hot, the heat of mid-summer, and before May is fully out. I am about to suggest it would be cooler in here, but relent and get up from the table at the window.

Down in the courtyard the heat radiates from every stone and column. Down here, at least, one does not smell the canals: a light breeze agitates the smoke of a dozen fires. It is too hot to eat inside. Tables of different heights and sizes have been laid under the trees around the fountain. As we cut across the patio Antonia shifts to that side as though to guard me. I am not sure she even notices. Most of the women have finished eating, the servants moving among them clearing, the young girls chasing each other about, playing at hopscotch, skipping. Strumming a
vihuela
quietly by the water is a girl I recognize. She could not have been more than five or six at the time but was soon good at her scales. Wearing the habit of a postulant now. Our path takes us quite near.

“Sor Juana.”

Others glance up. Nuns, novices. Not all the looks are hostile. Some sympathetic, a smile or two.

“Sor Juana.”

“Sor Juana.”

“Dando un paseo, Sor Juana….”

“¡Qué calor de infierno! eh Sor Juana?”

I say to Antonia they should not be calling me that. I am a novice now.

“Of course you are.”

I see she is taking me to another part of the convent, through a long arched passageway that leads from the patio. At the end of it the orchards and gardens stand off to one side. A breeze blows here, gains strength as we advance. All down the passageway, along the ledges, clay vessels of water stand; from the ceiling hang water bags for cooling. Simple convection—cool orchard air rushing through to replace the hot, rising from the patio. It is as if, just ahead, someone has opened a door onto the sea.

An arch of soft light before us, more light behind, in the passageway it is all but dark. I pause a moment, to stand in the breeze, lift the rough woollen cowl from my neck. “These things are itchy in the heat. I'd forgotten.”

Wordlessly Antonia turns to take the lid from a large clay jar sweating on the ledge, lifts back the cowl from my head, sprinkles cool water
over my scalp. In three months the hair has come back slowly, straight, black, like bristles.

“I feel like a porcupine.”

“You look like one.”

“You're one to talk. Take yours off.”

Swiftly she stoops to lift the hem of her shift, stops at her thighs. A few years ago, the faint light of the patio well behind us, she would not have stopped at a threat. I reach up to remove her headpiece. She inclines her head. I free her hair.

It is like a roper's workshop, little finger-length drills and twists of cord. On tiptoe now, I reach up slowly to take down a smaller water jar and in one motion pour it over her head. She gasps. I feel her strong hands at my wrists, watch coils and rills spin from her hair to fall against the light.

“Where are you taking me, 'Tonia?”

“It's a surprise.”

“So was that.”

“So we're even.”

“I'm not very good with surprises today.”

It is not too dark to see the change in her expression.“Of course—I'm sorry.”

“No … it's just this heat.”

“I'm taking you to Vanessa and Concepción for supper.”

I know it is not the whole surprise, and that it has to do with the chaplain's news, but I had been afraid she was taking me to the locutories. It is not a question of trust. The dread is never far.

“Show me your herb garden while you dry off.” I need a moment, and the detour I know will please her. It is where she grows the herbs and essences she puts in our baths. “If we go to those two like this, who knows what pranks we'll put them up to.”

We skirt the edge of the orchard along the infirmary wall, faint grey, texture of muslin. The branches nearest us are heavy with blossoms. Something is always in bloom. Now it is the pomegranates. After the herb garden we take the long way around, drawing out the hour, before the quarrel we each know is coming starts up again. Plots of beans and squash,
jícama
and
chayote
, past the trellises. I do not know how to say good-bye. But for weeks I have been trying to persuade her to leave. I have some money put by for her and for my nieces, an attachment on the
convent accounts. It is not an inconsiderable amount. I have shown her the location of the codicil in the archives, and though she did not want to listen, made her promise at least to inform my nieces of its existence, in the event I should be taken.

We turn at the water tank below the windmill on the roof, blades spinning, water knifing from a clay pipe angled just over the surface, the tank nearly filled.

She must see that it is more difficult for me that they can still threaten her here. Can I not see, she's asked in return, how cruel it is to say this when I know she is not leaving? No what was cruel was the delusion we could be happy here. There is nothing here for her—there is nothing for her anywhere
else
. But that is no reason—it
is
, but I'm not listening. We could start again in secret. No, she has her own vocation to follow now. Then name a better place for a woman to write poetry than here—certainly not the house she came from.