Hunger's Brides (4 page)

It was harvest time—I would have been nearly two—when I discovered the roof. I was in the courtyard confecting mud delicacies in the flower beds when there began a faint but incessant knocking at the great double doors. Eventually Xochitl hobbled over to open them for a dozen or so fieldworkers saddled under immense baskets of maize. Very quietly the first worker asked if
la patrona
was in, and when Xochitl shook her head, their faces brightened.

I had edged closer to determine for sure that these baskets, higher than each man's head and tapering to a point behind his knees, were indeed attached by straps—or was this some sort of centaur of the fields?

Xochitl waved them in. The baskets must have been crushingly heavy, to judge by how the straps cut into each brown shoulder. And still the men lingered at the door, asking after her, and very respectfully. Her health, her hip, her daughter Amanda, who was sleeping in the
rebozo
strapped to Xochitl's back.

Xochitl said to hurry up, before doña Isabel returned to find them all standing around.

“Yes, hurry up,” I parroted, eager to see what might happen next with those baskets.

“You have taught her our tongue?” one asked.

“She learned. Same as Amanda.”

“Doña Isabel does not mind?”

The first few men through the doors were all looking at me now.

“Go on up,” Xochitl said more sternly, and drew the screen aside.

For over a year I had played in that courtyard with only a folding screen of woven straw between me and the sacred science of the stair. I had seen the ascending rectangles begin halfway up the wall and had—to the extent I noticed at all—thought them ornaments. It seemed my older sisters had not been interested; but then, they could go
outside
and wrestle for their lives with the coyotes and eagles and panthers and jaguars—and who knew what else—that we heard at night.

One by one the corn men lumbered up. Then, from down below where I swayed in wonder, I watched them turn and, from the topmost rectangle, step straight into the sky.

Xochitl shifted to block my ascent and redrew the screen, but the next day at siesta, I clambered up—with all the grace of a turtle, an indignity foisted on me by the thoughtless wretch who had built the steps so high.

At first all I took in was a wobbly carpet of cobs baking in the sun, and the hot, moist smell of the world as a drying oven. All I had known was the compound. I was splendidly unprepared for what I now saw.

Even a very short girl could see for nearly ten leagues
†
all around.

To the southeast was a jumbled crust of sharp hills and spent craters like heaps of burnt sugar subsiding in a pan of caramel. To the southwest, as though warped on a loom, rough-woven panels of sugar cane stretched, and all through them the silver threading of irrigation ditches.
An Aztec
feather-cape
of greens fanned west and north—deep groves of limes and oranges, and blue-green plantations of what I eventually learned were Peruvian pineapple. Closer in, ranks of spindly papaya and the oily green oars of banana trees transplanted from the Philippines.

It may have been then that I had my earliest intimation of the links running from form to knowledge to power, for it was not long afterwards I began to draw. Maybe if I drew a thing I might learn to look for what I had not yet seen. And no sooner had I taken up my first piece of charcoal, than my eye found the pyramid in Popocatepetl. It took longer for my mind to trace the paradox hidden underneath: that volcanoes should mimic the simplest, stablest polyhedron, the pyramid—five sides to the cube's six. To picture that smouldering mass up there as
stable
was like a gentle tickling right behind the eyes.

For the next year I went up to the
azotea
every day, once I'd endured the first few spankings and then the dire injunctions to stay well back from the ledges.

Out onto the plain—as day after day I sketched their progress—the long dun caterpillars of aqueducts edged forth on their tiny arches … and on cold winter mornings I traced the little teapots of hot springs that riddled the join of plain and hill. Farther off stood a lonely tableland, and on it what Grandfather felt was certainly the ruined city of the House of Flowers. If only I looked hard enough I might make out the huge stained stones through the tangle of overgrowth … and then I would draw them for him.

I had discovered a world!—entire and new.

And now my old world was about to discover me. For I'd started trailing after my sister Josefa, who was not going out each day to wrestle jaguars after all, but to attend a school for girls. Though her teacher, Sister Ada, would not at first let me into the classroom, as I was only three, she indulged me, allowing me to look on through the window at their lessons of reading and writing. On the third day, as though by magic, a small bench of fresh white pine, sticky still with fragrant resins, stood under the low window. It was tranquil there beneath the arches, bees whirring among the bougainvillaea and geraniums, the gurgle of a little fountain echoing as from within a cave…. But I felt a great mystery about to be revealed. Far from nodding off as Sister Ada must have expected, I fairly bristled with concentration. The way my mouth was watering, one would have thought I was observing a lesson in cookery.

“I
must
learn to read,” I pleaded that third day. “Please don't tell my mother—please?” Sister Ada consented not to tell for a little while, versed as she was in the attention span of three-year-olds. But when two more weeks had passed she insisted I ask my mother's permission, and in exchange she would find me a seat in the classroom, where I might learn a little of the alphabet. And what good would a seat inside do anyone spanked by Isabel? “No, no,” I said, “I like your classes very well, but I can read now.” She laughed—no,
brayed
. Which annoyed me, so I proceeded to treat her to samplings from the many little mottoes pinned up about the classroom walls. I had just the rudiments of reading but my memory was prodigious, and in combination these were enough to make her cross herself and go quite pallid. In our region, when one learns swiftly it's said,
The sorcerer has passed there
. Anyway her gesture was to me a very satisfactory form of applause. I thanked her for the lessons and left.

Grandfather was away in Mexico City visiting my aunt and her rich husband. A day or two later he returned with his latest trove of books and a few childish texts to serve me as primers, but he found it was too late for these.

That same week the parish priest made a rare visit to my mother. At its conclusion Padre Luis, himself a man of scant education, confided, “Your Juanita has much promise. God must have designed her for great exploits.”

Isabel had little time for either priests or the Church. “Well then,” she replied, “he should have
designed
her as a man.”

From that day forward, Padre Luis went about suggesting, to anyone who would listen, that there was an unholy character to my hunger for learning. Priests.

I stopped eating cheese, though the
queso de campo
of the region—stringy and sharp and sour smelling—was a great favourite of mine. It was said that cheese made one stupid, and I already learned too slowly to appease my appetite. Though I missed the cheese sometimes, I did find that within a few months I could read nearly anything. Now when I needed to ask the meaning of an unfamiliar word, often only Grandfather could give it. If he was away for more than a week, we might spend an hour or two like this, with him helping me vanquish my collection of strange new foes.

First among the cherished memories of my childhood is that big sun
face, round and tan, a thick red-grey ruff lining his jaw and tufting his chin. My
abuelo's
was the first serious portrait I sketched. His hair was reddish brown, the hairline high and well back from his temples, which lent a further roundness to the cheeks and forehead. His eyes were green, and clear as gems. After seeing him next to Father, I could no longer confidently call him tall; he was thick-set, with rounded shoulders. And down the years, to line up my sketches of him side by side was as if to chart the progress of ageing in the cinnamon bear.

Grandfather rented two haciendas from the Church. Ours in Nepantla, which Isabel ran, and another he looked after, higher up, just below the pass. In that house was a library I had only heard him speak of, but that shimmered in my mind as the real and true El Dorado. And it was from that great larder of books that Grandfather regularly restocked his shelf in Nepantla. Architectural studies, treatises on Euclid and Galen, and—still maddeningly inaccessible—the Latin poets. Virgil and Lucretius, Lucan and Catullus, Seneca and Juvenal. The names alone were as the metres of a mighty epic.

By the time I was five I had sworn an oath on the little ruby pricked from my thumb to learn Latin without delay. This was to be the first of my great failures, for as it turned out I would not master the godlike speech of Romans for almost ten years.

In translation, mercifully, was Ovid's
Metamorphoses
, and of course Grandfather's beloved
Iliad
and
Odyssey
. And the great classic of our Castilian tongue, Baltasar de Vitoria's
The Theatre of the Pagan Gods
. But the book he perhaps treasured most was by a soldier who fought under Cortés.
The True History of the Conquest of New Spain
is an old man's chronicle of the campaign, a story of the sufferings and deceptions inflicted on the common soldiers the author had fought beside as a youth.

“Books are powerful,” Abuelo said. “This single book is why,
en mi opinión
, the many generations of us who followed Cortés have raised not a single monument to him.”

Books
were
powerful, irresistible even: the scent of mildew they brought down from the mountains was for me like fresh bread, a bakery laid out between each set of covers.

Grandfather was a capable if reluctant farmer, but how he loved riding out over the land. Sometimes it was to El Dorado, or the land of Quivira, or the Seven Golden Cities of Cíbola, and then he would return
to share out some of that fabled hoard: a legend, a rumour, a report he'd just read or heard.

“We live, Angelita, in the El Dorado of legends.
Sabes
, not so many years ago, on his way to a city on a lake, a man named Hernán Cortés—”

“Because he was courteous?” I asked, eager to show off.

“I doubt he was called Cortés for his courtesy. With his soldiers and a few horses, this Cortés was coming from the east, up from the sea. Sometimes they had to hack their way through the densest jungles they had ever seen. But as they worked their way upwards, he and his men began to climb through a cool forest of cedar and pine. Huge trees with growths hanging from them, like the beards of prophets. Yes,
feel
—but much longer than mine. Once at the pass, Cortés stood gasping in the thin air, satisfied he was now higher than any man had stood in Europe. Yet the peaks soared still a thousand
varas
†
above their heads. He was surer than ever that it was indeed snow up there—though it was beyond belief, in such steamy latitudes as these. Can you see it, Juanita, the stubble on those lean wolf jaws of his? To confirm the marvel, he sent up ten men to fetch down ice.”

Grandfather neglected to add that they went also to fetch sulphur for their cannon; nor did he mention that Xochitl was from the pass and was his source for the story of the ice. She would one day tell me her people were greatly reassured by such a display of human curiosity from one rumoured to be the god FeatherSerpent returning from the East.

But they had never seen a curiosity quite like this.

“Just a few leagues from this hacienda—just there, beyond that next hill—Cortés came down from our sacred mountain to meet the Mexican Emperor. They met on the south shore of the lake that circled the imperial city …
great Tenochtitlan.”

“Mexico,” I said gravely.

“Yes, Angel, and here everything begins. See them: Cortés and Moctezuma
†
stand in the shadows of late afternoon, beside the longest of the stone causeways connecting the island to the land. This one, which we have now renamed the Calzada de San Antonio, is as straight as the horizon at sea on a still day. And wide enough to accommodate six carriages abreast! Before this day, the emperor's feet have never been allowed to touch the earth. Now, he stands ankle-deep in soft black mud. Into that mud he inserts the full length of his index finger. And what comes next stuns his attendants. He places it in his mouth …”

Here was a gesture of grace, of surrender to
charys
, that Grandfather considered worthy of an Athenian—of old Pericles himself.

In a few weeks the great Moctezuma II, Regent of the Fifth Sun, incarnation of the war god BlueHummingbird who commanded a million men, would be taken prisoner in his own palace by a ragtag band of mercenaries. Iron clad, gold crazed, famished, reeking from the purulence of their wounds. Or so, listening to my grandfather, I imagined them. Locatable by their smell even through the stench of the dread Black Room, its every surface tarred in blood. There, stunned by their success, uncanny in its suddenness, they hold Moctezuma captive. Though captained by a lawyer
(¡un abogado!
—
¡imagínate, Juanita!)
they are in truth led and guided by a woman the Mexicas had sold to the Mayans as a slave. Now she has returned to bring her people, the chosen ones, a very different destiny.