Hunger's Brides (36 page)

  and

    We

      leapt!

        and came up gasping shock and squealing laughter.

Afterwards, exhausted, we would lie splayed out on our backs beside the big pool. Now was the time for listening to the water plunge, for watching the clouds over at the tip of Popocatepetl smouldering there across from us. Eventually, when we could bring ourselves to stir again we would peer down, on hands and knees, to the bottom of the pool and point out to each other with our noses the locations of crayfish and frogs. And in a certain light with the surface of the pool slightly wavering, I could not have distinguished her reflection from my own.

But that day we still had a mystery to solve. From the lower bench we had seen the last of the high cataracts laddering down from the snow line to vanish into a crevice a good way up the bare, dry wall that formed the forehead of Ixayac. And yet there was this stream here beside us.

The holds for hands and feet were not at all easy to make out, and the rocks, continuously wet, were slimy and treacherous. But the climb proved worth the risk. The upper bench was as wide as the first but less deep, the bare rock wall vertical, soaring hundreds of
varas
above us.

But what we were ecstatic to discover was a single jet of water, waist high, bursting from the dry stone in a long rooster tail.

“Let's stand in there!” Amanda cried, dragging me in. We tried to hold out against the force of water but anywhere near the opening was impossible. The horizontal surge had scalloped out a shallow teardrop from the smooth bedrock. There in the pool where the jet fell to our shins we could just hold on, clutching desperately at each other's arms for fear of being swept down to the lower bench. The water—a liquid snow—sent an ache like a deep bruise through our knees and shins. When we could take no more we staggered out to come and sit sideways at the ledge, stretching our legs out on warm stone worn smooth as a hide.

I came to see that the skin cream of our region did have magical properties, in the delicate spell of stopped time. For the next year we ran past the trout pool to Ixayac, and never told a soul. Perhaps we kept the secret for Xochitl, who could not go up and had told only us. It was a time of searching—it was only a game—for rituals and visions and secret ceremonies.

I have been instructed to meditate upon all the crimes of my life, to overlook none, no matter how seemingly small, and truly who can tell which sins are great, which insignificant? I return to this time and find they are not few.

Yet there is so much here I find difficult to regret. It was a year of pleasures so intense I ached with them, and do still some nights. We woke so fresh each dawn, ready to use our hearts again, ready to make them run. In this manner the circuit of our childhood quietly crossed its equinox, and into a season of lengthening shadows, where, if anything, the air was brighter, clearer. I feel that year still as a memory in my legs, my knees, my thighs, for we ran everywhere—we ran in delight, we ran to joy, and it turned and waited. For one more year. Childhood, the purest part of it, was drawing to a close.

For the Greek's, whose language I have still not learned, the word for this particular excellence I think is not
aret?
but
át?
, which some call
‘ruin.' Once, though, it meant divine infatuation. Sophocles must have preferred this sense, for it was he who said mortal life can have no true greatness or excellence without the special infatuation that is átē.
¹³

But while we were at Ixayac, the heart of the earth beat only for us, and time seemed to stop.

A
fter the decline of Athens and before the rise of Constantinople there was the city Alexander founded on the ruins of ancient Egypt, at the mouth of the Nile. In Alexandria's harbour stood the island of Pharos, its lighthouse a wonder to all the ancient world. Fifty fathoms high, and in its curved mirror the whole world stood reflected, as in the panoptic eye of God. A promontory shaped like an hourglass lay between Pharos and Alexandria, and behind the city spread a lake, Mareotis.

City of the suicides Cleopatra and Marc Antony, site of Alexander's tomb, built by his viceroys the Ptolemies. From Ethiopia and Upper Egypt, Persia and Palestine, Rome and Athens the settlers came. The Ptolemies constructed a museum and gave orders that every ship entering port surrender its books so that copies could be made, and so to collect a knowledge that came and went on the winds. Books from everywhere—not just in Greek but in Persian, Hebrew, the holy languages of the Indies, and in the hieroglyphics.

At the firepit I exclaimed over the great works inspired by the liberal patronage of the Ptolemies. Troubled by my first doubts as to the vastness of our holdings, I asked Abuelo how was it he'd never brought out books on Alexandria before. And might not the generous collections of Mexico City have a similarly inspirational effect here? Which was my way of asking when he had last been to Mexico for new books.

Since, he ventured in reply, Alexandria was my current area of scholarly interest—with, evidently, a sub-specialization in the romances of Cleopatra—did I perhaps recall reading that the Serapeum had housed also the Nile-gauge, sacred controller of floods? Geometry too was a gauge. The Alexandrians became great geometers precisely because the flooding forced them to revise their land surveys so often.

“You see, they
practised.”
He let the word hang a moment in the air. “So,
señorita
, perhaps we might soon be seeing a revival of your own studies in geometry….”

On Grandfather' book tray the next afternoon was just such a work. All of them, in fact, had to do with geometry, as if he'd simply lifted an entire section onto the tray. The topmost volume was the most appetizing,
with quite beautiful engravings. It was in Latin, which he of course read and I still could not without guessing at every second word. Finding me still there frowning over the figures at suppertime, Abuelo said he was happy to see me working at my mathematics again. He said this gently not reproachfully at all. I studied his face closely for the irony I expected there and found none. What he had chided me for on one day he seemed to have forgotten the next. That is what came to my attention at the time. But how painful to wonder if he had been hoping I would ask his help. I'd been neglecting so much more than mathematics and Latin. This would come to me in time.

Alexandria's was a revival that would have made even Alexander's strict tutor proud. There was Euclid, and Heron, master of the triangle, who invented a water wheel driven by
steam
alone. Apollonius of Perga—the Great Geometer they called him. Even Archimedes had come to Alexandria as a boy, had absorbed its passions as he walked beside the Nile and visited the lighthouse at Pharos. For did he not invent a screw for raising and lowering water levels, did he not install a great curved mirror in the lighthouse of Syracuse to set fire to the Roman fleet, did he not die trying to keep a Centurion from carrying off the very diagrams now before me? Well, if he died to preserve them, surely it would not kill me to study them carefully, even in Latin and Greek. For this was precisely what the natural philosophers of our century were doing. Ours was a revival of the Alexandrian revival, a rebirth raised to the second power. Galileo, of course, but others too in Italy and France, divining and reformulating the forgotten geometric techniques of the ancients, as laid out in the
Conics
and the legendary
Plane Loci
, a lost work that had raised endless speculations for the past thousand years. I worked with great speed. If I was to be of any help there was no time to lose.

The Nile may have made the Alexandrians great geometers, but it was into the conic sections that their greatest passion was channelled. The cone in itself was intriguing enough: in outline a triangle, in surface curved like a sphere. But where transected by a plane, precisely there at its edge, like a broadsword's swipe through a gorgon's neck, the joining spawns the most marvellous hybrid brood: parables made of mind and number, planes
and
solids both, the straight and the curved, intersecting there at order's edge in the cut that does not stop, time itself turned to stone…. At last,
there it was
. For through the conic sections and with
Alexandria's help I had finally seen it: Geometry as the swordhand of Perseus raising the Gorgon's head aloft.

As I read and worked, the sum of books in the library of Alexandria was mounting towards seven hundred thousand. A staggering number, and more flowing in every day. There came to me late, well into the night, an image of the Nile itself as that river of knowledge, and the beginnings of a verse.

I saw knowledge in a river, libraries in the sea—one blue sea as the library of the Nile, and all the rivers of the world that verse there, collected, catalogued, held. I saw a city in an hourglass, the eye of God in a lighthouse … and it came to me that the bright geometric figures, these and the arcane equations that represented them, were themselves so like hieroglyphs. For if hieroglyphs were symbols drawn from nature, might not Nature herself be distilled in formulas just such as these?

Long after I put out the lamp, behind my closed lids danced traces of light—triangles and parallelograms, spheres and cones, shapes called tetrahedron, dodecahedron … secret formulae, r=a?, A=?r
²
…

Early in our explorations at Ixayac we had been forced to concede that the axolotls were gone from the pool or we would have seen one, no matter how cunning its camouflage. But we had found enchantments enough as the days and months passed. In the shallows scuttled crayfish, and tiny snails. Little frogs that heaved and leaned at each croak as if crooning to a duet partner. And as in a gathering of the very highest aerial society, we decided, red-trimmed butterflies danced minuets devised by dryads, while blue dragonflies shuffled and snapped and skimmed over the water. One day we carried two small turtles up from the river to keep them all company. The turtles grew as the snails disappeared, but there were a few tadpoles left that we decided were very much like salamanders.