Hunger's Brides (16 page)

Now, there were sixty thousand
burritos
dredging out the canals and drainage ditches around the valley on any given day. But not the same sixty thousand. Many died too quickly to learn a trade or to acquire special skills. Many from the mountains had not learned to swim.

Water was not their element. But then, the lake was being drained.

As it was with the labourers, so it was with our house servants. It was not so much that they belonged nowhere else—they belonged
to
nowhere else. In Nepantla and Panoayan our field hands were rented from the Church; they came with the land. Yet I had never seen my mother, for all her faults, treat a field hand unfairly or speak to him cruelly. María, who on the canal dock had so clearly been Isabel's sister, was not like her at all.

This was Injustice.

I was permitted one monthly excursion of a personal nature, though never alone. I was allowed to buy books. This one right was never questioned, never threatened. So, whenever Uncle Juan requested my
presence in the salon, I tried to go less grudgingly. Abuelo's fifty pesos were so much more money than I'd understood. And when the booksellers learned whose granddaughter I was, fifty pesos became a hundred. I had known the bookmen's names for years, heard them listed many times in a roll call of thieves, and no doubt many were, but thieves with sentiments. Their sentimental gestures began to fill my shelves. My prison would have a library.

My room was on the third floor and was larger than mine in Panoayan. During the day at least, it was quiet on the third floor. The room faced east, with a view of the mountains, though I permitted myself only glimpses. The mornings were full of light and warmth and the afternoons dim and cool. But the most splendid feature by far was the bookshelves. They made almost the full circuit of the room. Though not ornate, they were well made, of a hardwood I didn't know, and built for this space. When I arrived they were also entirely bare of books.

The prisoner hadn't expected to find her cell so agreeable. Nor had I expected such a good first impression of Uncle Juan. I remembered imagining, years before and on no evidence whatever, that he and my grandfather had quarrelled. That was why Abuelo was making fewer visits to Mexico.

The day I arrived, Uncle Juan himself supervised my cedar trunk's precarious ascent, directing the porters to set their burden down next to the bookshelves. He seemed to have guessed about the books. His brusqueness with the porters bespoke a habit of command, but he thanked them—casually and very badly—in Nahuatl. The phrase he so blithely dismantled was
Tlazohcamati huel miac
. I looked hard to see if this was supposed to impress me, but though painful to my ear it tripped off his tongue like a stone worn smooth from a very long journey in one's shoe.

He said
Tasoca
, he had said it often, and I was impressed.

At the door he nodded, a little shyly. “The shelves will look better with books in them again.” At that, he turned to go.

“I hope you didn't give up your office, Uncle.”

His smile seemed faintly perplexed. “No, Juanita. We have offices near the palace. It's where I have to spend most of my time now.”

And so it was. Not a month went by, it seemed, in which I saw him more than once—usually in the salon with his business associates, some of whom had literary tastes. For their entertainment I might be asked to
improvise verses on a theme or rhyme scheme of their choosing. One or two of his regular visitors displayed a genuine interest. I eventually let them hear poems I was writing. Though it was not quite a pleasure, neither could I make the salon out to be a torture. Still, at the first opportunity I would excuse myself and go up to my room.

If I stood—at first, on a chair under my window, or then a small stack of books, or soon just stood—I could see down into the street. Once it happened that a neighbourhood urchin spotted my face up there, and we would exchange a sign or two from time to time. Over the years the faces changed and the number of urchins grew, as if the window had become a landmark; I came to believe their knowledge of the city was as intimate as ours had been of our woods.

Finally a small gang of more prosperous boys noticed me, and my window became the target of their affections. There were spectacular, manly throws of rotting fruit: the best results came with tomatoes. One time, for my entertainment, using fireworks I imagine, they blew up a watermelon in the street, an early instalment on the day they would find a catapult, or a cannon. I tried not to take umbrage—perhaps they were only practising for the theatre, which I hoped to visit one day too.

The nights were altogether different from the day's calm. The house was in the southeast barrio, and though land was indeed scarce in the centre, Uncle Juan had built here by choice, to be closer to the canals. It was an Indian barrio, well supplied with
pulque
concessions. Carefully supervised by Church and Crown, the trade in
pulque
remained one of Uncle Juan's more profitable businesses. Two thousand
arrobas
†
a day, every day.

Eventually I grasped that some
pulquerías
also served as houses of prostitution. At daybreak, when the sun struck the wall above my bed well before there was brightness in the streets, the poor harlots could be seen doubled up against a wall—sleeping, I hoped, and not badly hurt. Sometimes there was more than one, sometimes they fought among themselves, or over clients—once over a little package that I couldn't make out, but which seemed precious to them. I could not keep from looking.

It must have been the starkest horror down in the beds of those canyons for someone with nowhere to turn, for even at the height of my room, the stillness was often rent by shouts and shrieks. The most brutal, grisly scenes of knives and cudgels and helplessness played themselves out under my lids. I could not keep from seeing myself huddled against just such a wall.

The night floated up on a tide of loneliness.

In that first year I was often terrified. Not so much of the streets themselves but of having nowhere to go.

I have become a light sleeper, I think from that time. When I did drift off, it was usually by snuffling my pillow, letting myself imagine it was Abuelo's shoulder. Drowsy, I could smell him. Mesquite from the firepit, and leather … warm wool, and the most delicious, very faint scent of rising dough.

It was only natural that I should wake in the night, having dreamt of him. Often the same dream: of him riding away on what I finally understood was Amanda's roan lamb. But he went west from Nepantla, not east, the direction my father had taken. Abuelo swaying on the back of a lamb as large as a camel didn't seem comical at all in a dream. When I awoke it felt as if he had just left the room.

One night something happened to make me wonder if as a young child I had often been afraid of the dark. I woke to screams. Coming from the streets three storeys down was a shrieking so terrible I couldn't get back to sleep at all. Lying there looking out at a quarter moon, I thought of a song we had learned from Xochitl. And of the time I first remembered hearing it. I was lying against her in a hammock, at night, in the storeroom behind the kitchen….

There had been a jaguar killing cattle. It had come closer to the house than anyone expected, into the corral, with the horses. I have never forgotten the screaming of the horses. Abuelo awoke in great confusion, and in his undergarments had started up to the watchtower to load the cannon. “Father, come down!” shouted Isabel. She'd taken an instant to throw on a cloak, and had an arquebus in her hands. She fired into the night above the courtyard.

The sound was shattering, coming without warning over the terror in the corral. Grandfather teetered on the steps as though he might fall. I froze, and my sisters, too—they huddled together just outside their room, their nightgowns a pale smudge of starlight. Isabel went inside to reload and before we could rouse ourselves Xochitl had brought Abuelo a lantern. As she helped him down the steps, she whispered something to him. I had never seen them speak. Returned to his senses, he rushed—lantern high—after Isabel, who was already through the portals. Xochitl scooped me up, told María and Josefa to go back to bed, and took me to sleep with her. Amanda was already there in Xochitl's hammock.

Xochitl sang to us. We lay on either side of her, clutching at her breast, as we had at the beginning. She sang the song of the magical sleeping mat. A mat against the jaguar, Night, who mocks and taunts our vision, who is the mirror that multiplies each shadow until our eyes are filled with giants. She sang a charm against the giant wizards and bandits who wait at the crossroads under the cover of night.

She sang us the song FeatherSerpent sang out to his sister, PreciousFeatherMat, where she fasted the four-year fast of penance with the mountain priests. The screaming had stopped, the shouts died out, and the gunshots. There was only Xochitl's voice now, its soft rattle and sway in our ears, its purr against our cheeks. Quetzalcoatl called to Quetzalpetlatl:

FeatherSerpent called out to his sister for protection and comfort, for he had been sickened and tricked by the jaguar, his adversary and twin. He had tasted now four times of the sacred
octli
,
†
and was intoxicated. In his vision, in his confusion he called his sister to his side, and she spent the night of intoxication with him, and brought him great comfort.

And next to Xochitl in the hammock I slept. But before I fell asleep I knew she'd sung that song to me before. It felt as if I had heard it many times.

I remembered the song and the desolation of that night from our first weeks in Panoayan. I remembered it all those years later in Mexico City in a still unfamiliar room walled in by dark bookshelves, with screaming coming up from the streets.

The next night I sang the song to myself, and slept deeply. I dreamed I woke. Abuelo was sitting beside the bed, not discomforted by the absence of a chair there and amused that this should worry me. I saw him as clearly as when we sat together at the little table by the library. “Angelina, think … what do you really want with all your heart? Only ask it.”

There was something in this, too, I had heard or felt before, and a few days later I found it in Kings. Solomon was in Gibeon making sacrifices to the God of his father, David. Well pleased, the God of David came to Solomon and asked him to name whatever he wanted.

Solomon asked neither riches nor honour but a wise and understanding heart, if he was to be given sovereignty over so great a people. He was granted what he asked, but also the riches and honour he did not seek.

I hadn't the faintest interest in riches, a good deal in honour, more still in understanding. What was the wisdom here that Abuelo was offering me? I read the passage again many times. It hurt—finally, in a good way—to be reminded of him, but I couldn't find it. I read all of Kings and Proverbs again, and the Song of Solomon. A mountain of wisdom was there, and passages of great beauty, but no special message that felt expressly for me. For the next several days I tried to be attentive to everything around me, which after all was only books, the household and the street. I thought again about Xochitl's song, the four-year fast, the four sips of
pulque
—had they got drunk on the fourth sip or the fifth? I remembered that FeatherSerpent had once travelled four years through the underworld with a big red dog. The two struggled together against giants and dragons, crossed deserts, brought back the bones of a lost race
of men. But I couldn't find the wisdom there, and after a few weeks I slept better. And thought less about my dreams.

I found other escapes. A frequent one during those years was
The Nun-Ensign
. It was the most awful play, based on the true history of Catalina de Erauso, a nun who broke out of a convent and, disguised as a man, fled to South America to gamble, duel, court ladies and battle Indians. For her valour in the field, she was decorated with the military commission of ensign. She met the Pope as a woman (Catalina, that is), and eventually returned to Mexico, once again a man, and finished out her days as a muleskinner. Given my special experiences with them, I felt I might one day aspire to something similar. Skinning one could not be that difficult, once you let the
pulque
out.

If my destiny was to live out my life in a prison of books, I was equal to it. And much better books than
The Nun-Ensign
lay all around me, but fewer and fewer still unread, at least in Castilian. Teaching myself Latin now was urgent. I had sworn to learn it years ago—all the way back in Nepantla. My vow so fervently renewed, I became infuriated by my slow progress. The feature that most distinguished me from Isabel was a rather beautiful head of blue-black hair. It had been the envy of my sisters and now my cousin Magda, too. I remember Magda standing at the door to my room to watch me, as for the second time I cut a good length of it off. She found the experience satisfying, apparently, for I remember how she made a point of letting me see. Pausing dramatically until I looked at her, she glanced about the room, finally at the shelves, half filled almost with books. Her face was bloated like an invalid's, and gloating was its sickness.

She hated me. After that, I never doubted it.

I saw nothing in her life to gloat about. Well, she could stare however hideously she liked, but I pledged that if I hadn't learned Latin by such and such a date, I would crop it back farther still.
Better to have a head shorn of hair than one empty of learning.
²³
It took twenty sessions and three haircuts before I pronounced myself satisfied. Next, I vowed, would come Italian, then Greek, then Portuguese, then French…. At least one language a year. At such a rate, by the time I was eighteen I might be ready to contemplate learning Arabic. Ready to contemplate anything at all except the birthdays themselves, which were exactly twice as bad as they might have been. I only knew how to celebrate birthdays for two.