Hunger's Brides (42 page)

Tonight for
el plato principal
was a fiery
manchamanteles
.
†
Stew green chillies for a full two days. Mix with roasted sesame seeds. Grind in mortar. Fry with chicken, sliced banana, apple, sweet potato.

Season as necessary.

Not for the first time I watched our parlour warrior displaying now the most sweetly piquant delicacy of constitution: sinuses and pores that fairly gushed at the slightest spiciness—making, to be sure, the stores accumulating there in the pilose pantry of his upper lip all the more savoury, despite all the hapless daubing and wiping of his overmatched napkin.

Isabel had known I was up to something from the instant I took up my station—without a book—next to Diego. And as I started in, those huge black eyes fixed me with such a look, as I addressed our military attachment with the first words I had ever spoken to him other than in answer to a direct question. What did he think of our little library? Surely in his travels he had seen much finer. Did he find anything in there he liked yesterday, had he flipped perhaps through a book or two? What were his own favourites and beloved authors? Novels of adventure, I guessed, as was only natural for a gentleman of action, but surely too the epics of chivalry, the exploits of the great knights, must fairly course through his veins—El Cid, Orlando. Why, he must be able to recite whole reams by heart as easily as breathing. On a day, that is, when his nostrils were less burdened. His martial intelligence could no doubt call upon vast stores of verses with which to inspire his men before a campaign. Like this one, wasn't it fine?

How did the next stanza go again, don Diego? No, but surely the simple soldier was only being modest. Even Cortés's captains had time for
literature, and they actually fought real battles, faced constant, cruel, relentless death. And hadn't the odds against them been tremendous? To take the battlefield today must be so disappointing, against a foe so reduced—diseased, defenceless, starved….

Exasperated to see me acting up at supper, Josefa came into my room afterwards with the marvellous news. Our mother was
pregnant
again. We would have a new brother or sister. They had known for ages already.

The next night, seeing that Isabel had said nothing so far, I felt my own valour fairly soaring, and with it my volubility. How could I fail—I fought on the side of right. As Saint Teresa herself had once said, God moves even in cooking pots. And from there to our table through the transubstantiations of spinach purée,
pollas Portuguesas
, rice tortes, c
lemole de Oaxaca, turco de maíz …

After heaping my plate with food, I had not so much as touched the cutlery, so busy was I with chattering at our guest while maintaining a commanding view of the terrain. I sat in a superb position to inventory the contents of his moustaches, accumulating as he ate. Even had this last observation not come to me quite so vividly, I would not have been tempted to touch my food. The hungers of my body were as nothing compared to those of my mind. And yet I cannot say my thoughts ran yet to victory: rather, to the image of my dying unflinchingly in the attempt. Unlike my sisters, I had never seen our mother pregnant; but over these past few days and particularly since last night I'd divined something at once frightening and thrilling in her eyes. Something hooded and veiled, yet serene—the brooding of some great magic. But no, I told myself, this was only the mystery of life growing within her, and an everyday sort of magic that was.

Over the next few hours I found myself casting about for words more adequate to express the new sensations those eyes provoked. Naturally she was still annihilatingly beautiful, her eyes lustrous and black, enormous. But now there was something in the relentlessness of her focus, something pitiless. I saw a lioness stalking belly to ground, painfully, her milk pooling angrily in the dust … but no, hysteria would not do. Composing lines in my head as I watched her, caricature was what I reached for—some disarming conceit on architecture. Instead, what came crowding in were more like verses of incantation, propitiatory—a counterspell.

In such desperate fashion did I screw up my courage, and so it went for the next few nights as I waged my crusade against the Infidel.

Through it all Diego nodded, sweated, stanched his nostrils, smiled and took more roast chicken, nodded bemusedly as my contempt grew. Just as I thought. Here was nothing but an opportunist, thick as pudding, and plodding and utterly without pride. It went on until even I began to pity him. With Grandfather there, I could not have done it. On the eve of Abuelo's return, Isabel put an end to it.

“All right, Inés.”

“All right what, Mother?”

“You
know
what.” I did know to heed the warning in that tone. “But you'll have the courtesy to ask him first.”

Ask Grandfather's permission, to enter
our
library?—it was the merest formality. It was over. It had been so easy. At first I was surprised that she hadn't intervened, if only to spare our guest. I had beaten him. But by now I knew my great ally had been neither valour nor righteousness but splendid timing. I had nature on my side, and Isabel had weightier concerns.

Within hours I would see by how much I had underestimated him. In my sisters' eyes now he would be nobler than ever. They would gaze upon him with something less like hunger than tenderness. As for our
mother, from that night forward she stopped asking him to leave her bed before dawn. Before I dismissed it, the idea came that she'd been sending him back to the garrison, just perhaps, to spare not Abuelo's feelings but my own.

As far as I could tell, Diego never slept in town again.

Here, then, was a better strategist and actor, a mercenary more disciplined, than I had given him credit for. Never letting himself be angered, remaining to all appearances confused, too vain and dim to be anything but despised and dismissed by me.

I had worried only about my keys to the library, rather than his to our gates. I had talked loosely of war, but what I had won was only a skirmish.

What's more, I was to discover that he'd fooled not just our mother and my sisters, not just me, but somehow Abuelo, too. For in a manoeuvre worthy of
los contratistas milaneses
,
†
he'd persuaded my grandfather to accept a loan. Though I would not know it for some time yet, this had been the very business they were concluding when I first stumbled upon them in the library. I never found out precisely how he managed it. Would it have been a gesture of restitution for leaving—or rather not leaving—Abuelo's daughter with child without marrying her? Whatever the stratagem, he must, with the most superb delicacy, have left the merest suggestion in the air….

So it was not, no, the poetry of El Cid that coursed through his veins but the icy blood of the Sforzas. Here was the best investment a hundred pesos ever returned. A payout on the arithmetical dowry machine like a win at roulette.

When Grandfather returned home he took the news of our great good fortune with admirable calm. I'd been looking out for him from the watchtower for hours. At a dead run I cut across the bean fields to meet him halfway up the track from the main road. He had brought the wagon back empty. Abuelo reined in the horses right there in the road and retrieved a single book from his
carpeta
.

“Here it is, Angel.
El libro de la caza de las aves…
. Now we shall find out about those falcons of yours.”

But did he think I had run to him only for this?

Looking anxiously into my face he went on. “I mentioned it was written in prison, did I not?” Now he seemed to think my expression one of disappointment. Hastily I accepted the book he'd been holding
out to me. “But did I remember to tell you that our author was also a kinsman of
los Manriques?
Queen Isabela's noblest defenders—the poet and his father? the founder of the Order of Santiago? You've not forgotten….”

The beautiful verses in the mouldering book he had asked me to read for him last year. No I hadn't forgotten. And I was not disappointed; no, I was grateful for his safe return, but puzzled, and yet could find no way to frame the question without seeming to complain. All that way for one book? Why take the wagon, then?

Naturally we had a special dinner to celebrate Abuelo's homecoming. There was a beet and apple cordial to drink, and red wine for Diego and my grandfather. Even María had a little glass. As we sipped and dabbled at a
sopa de ajo
, our mother smiled and chatted easily with my sisters and Diego, while equably I avoided glancing at the moistening tip of his nose. There was such an air of occasion I was half expecting her to announce her condition to all, although it was ridiculous: this was not at all the way to break such news to one's own father. And yet it seemed suddenly mean and unfair that Grandfather should be the last to know….

In fact, I had been the last to know. He had been the first she'd told. It had prompted his trip. Abuelo had gone to talk to Uncle Juan about my one day soon coming to Mexico.

After Amanda had cleared the soup bowls, Isabel encouraged Abuelo to tell us of his journey, which he did with surprising economy. Returned from such excursions in the past, he had treated us to accounts of hair-raising encounters with highwaymen and wild beasts never before seen outside of Africa, and to rousing denunciations of the grasping churchmen from whom we leased the hacienda. Tonight he mumbled only that it had gone well. Taking in his weariness, Mother asked gently for simpler news, of Aunt María and her husband; and as Isabel waited for a reply the black eyes I had lately been composing apotropaic verses upon glanced an instant into mine. Just then Amanda came in with less than her usual grace as she strained under the weight of a great china platter almost her armspan wide.

I had managed to avoid
her
eyes for days now. I hadn't played—had hardly spoken with her since the disaster at Ixayac. If I had looked at her now I might have seen
she
was the one who thought she'd done something wrong up there, that she had let me down somehow, or hurt me.

Nor did I see that she had followed my lead and stopped eating too, just as I had while Abuelo was away, as evidence of my seriousness. It was a gesture Amanda had read instantly and answered in kind, in the language she understood better than anyone … and so much better than I, who took so long to read her reply.

And how like Amanda to speak as she spoke to me now.

Under a sprinkling of black olives and pine nuts, raisins and
chile chipotles
were two enormous trout, grilled whole and entirely filling the platter. One trout lay on its side, the other on its belly—they must have weighed five
libras
†
each. They could only have come from one place, one way. And indeed the platter had been placed before me and turned to show the wound in each trout's side, where the spear had gone through.

How could I avoid her eyes now? I couldn't, but for an instant I still tried, dreading what I might find there—triumph, vindication, scorn? Instead I found what looked like exhaustion, like Abuelo, as if she had carried that platter all the way from Mexico. And then she was gone.