Hunger's Brides (8 page)

The flower beds—roses, calla lilies, hyacinths—had run wild, and now nodded and buzzed and beamed along the colonnade from kitchen to dining room to what was now my bedroom, next to the watchtower steps at the northwest corner. From my bed, which Amanda and I had dragged under the window, I could see all but the tips of the volcanoes, so high were they, so close by.

I had expected a hard fight from my sisters for that room. But María found the volcanoes oppressive; Josefa
just shuddered
to imagine the sight
of them at night. So instead they made a great show of their maturity by choosing to share the only room left. I applauded this. And, yes, it was the largest—fractionally. To one side of them was our mother's room, on the southwest corner next to the entrance to the chapel. To the other side was Grandfather's room, in the southeast corner next to the library.

The library, I resolved, would later be reconnoitred from every possible angle. Chins propped on our forearms, forearms on the sill, we had been kneeling on my bed under the window onto the courtyard.

“But Amanda,” I said, “where do you and Xochita sleep?”

She led me at a dead run past the dining room and into the kitchen: beyond it hung two hammocks in the pantry's back corner. It seemed unprepossessing to me, cramped even. She was thrilled that she and Xochitl each had a window, and that the two afforded a cross-breeze (designed not for their pleasure but to keep the pantry cool and dry).

I kept this last observation to myself but resolved to take the matter up with Grandfather. “Let it alone, Angel. Amanda is happy.”

And so I did. There was so much else to do.

Once we had settled in, the next order of business was to thwart the movement to put me in school. I had missed the first two months, and was certain to be made the butt of the cruellest pranks and jokes. Isabel surprised me by taking this seriously. Besides, I told Grandfather once she was out of earshot, there was not much chance of falling behind in only a year since apparently my classmates could not yet
read
. Here I let my head loll about like a boggled newborn, at which Grandfather laughed wheezily.

“I've been reading for
three years
already, Abuelo, did you know that?” My average was a book a week, and lately more like two. So that made over two hundred now, and I began to recite them for him in alphabetical order. Thus was the matter quickly settled.

And next fall was an eternity away….

I was not quite as confident of my advantage as I let on. Through each siesta I read furiously while the others slept. Beside me, Grandfather snored his bliss for an hour in a hammock strung between the arcade's columns before the library door. I sat at a small table, his hammock beside me, an armspan away. Under one window, on the inside table, was a chess set. Reaching through the wrought-iron bars we could have played, my imaginary opponent and I, like contented prisoners whiling
away the years. But I had a library to conquer, book by book. And so at the little table crowding the door, I sat—
stuck
. For this was the threshold I had not yet won Isabel's permission to cross.

“I said no, Inés. The library is a man's place. It is not for little girls too accustomed already to having their way.” She had said this not even looking down, with me trotting alongside her on the way to the paddocks. “I don't care what he said. He spoils you.” She was splendid, I had to admit, striding out in the sun, tucking that thick chestnut hair under her sombrero. In her riding boots she was almost as tall as I remembered Father, taller than Abuelo. I hadn't known anyone could cover so much ground just walking—it was a wonder she bothered with horses at all. She walked the way I talked—would she stop for a minute, wouldn't she care to explain?—we could negotiate. She laughed, then. A laugh deep like a man's. Warm. Brief. I couldn't remember ever making her laugh. I would try to be funnier the next time. But she still didn't stop or even look down.

Neverthless, that day and the next and until she stopped bothering to reply, I got some inkling of her reasons. Women and books had no place in this country; a woman's place was out in the world, in the fields and grain exchanges and stock markets, if she was prepared to fight for it. And if she wasn't, she would be at the mercy of men all her life. Not all the wishing or fighting in the world put women in libraries.

We would see about that. Time, I thought, was on my side. And since she had been so obliging about school, I laboured mightily at patience.

In the meantime, Grandfather brought me out each day a heaping tray of books to choose from—and a fine, adult selection, too. Each afternoon he shuffled through that doorway, and in his face was the quiet pride of a baker with a tray. In just that way did he place the books before me.

And through those days and weeks, it was as though I had broken open a vast garner. But I was no granary mouse. I ate like a calf, like a goat—everything at once. Herodotus, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Thucydides—here, at last I had reached the source of all learning. Our great poets, Lope de Vega and Góngora—the
early
Góngora, Grandfather stressed with a certain severity. Our Bible, of course, and now Juan de la Cruz
†
and his love lyrics to Christ.

And tales—of hungry picaroons erring through the Spanish countryside. While reading
Don Quixote
, I woke
mi abuelito
in the Hammock of the Sacred Nap almost every afternoon to protest the cruelties of
Cervantes, who, Grandfather conceded, had suffered sufficient indignities himself to know better.

This is probably why, the day I reached for Homer's
Iliad
, Grandfather placed his hand over mine. There was something we should talk about first. An attack by Apollo—
¡el emboscada más cobarde
!
†
—against Achilles' noble friend Patroklos. Though Abuelo sketched out for me just the barest outlines of that craven blow to the back—and from a
god
—his voice grew husky and tottery under the burden of Apollo's disgrace. So when the dark day again fell across those pages, I prodded his shoulder till he woke, and shared with him my outrage. No, Abuelo, you were right, this was not at all a thing for a god to do.

For a week or two that first winter we puzzled together over a volume by an Italian, Pico della Mirandola, which I thought a marvellous sort of name. It was a treatise, Grandfather believed, on updating the hexachord to the octave, which he was very keen to read. This splendidly named
musicus
had written it in Latin, which my
abuelo
read easily. The trouble was that by inadvertence he'd purchased an Italian translation of an Italian who wrote in Latin.

At one point, we had fairly run the gamut when Grandfather sounded a note not far from fury. “Ut!” he sputtered. “This … this is finally and completely enough!”

I responded with a great severity of my own. “A terrible translation, no, Abuelo? That it should give two such scholars so much trouble?”

At this he coughed and patted my hand. “Yes, Angelita, a bad translation. That must be so.”

By then an eternity had translated itself into a year. It was autumn and time to enrol in school, which brought me crashing to earth. I sat—dazed, in a sort of horological horror—in the forecourt of the school, under the motto Charity, Chastity and Grace. Just inside, Grandfather was arguing that I should be placed if not with the teenagers then in the third year at the very lowest.

Yes, don Pedro, but grandfathers were, after all,
expected
to think their little
nietas
†
very
precocious.
“Más, fíad, señor
, in our long experience with children.” Since this would be my first year, I must of course begin with the beginners, but—
but—
they, the reverend sister teachers, would know just how to bring me along at a satisfactory pace.

The fourth week ended prematurely, on the Wednesday afternoon, though it began exactly as had the others, and that was the problem.
With our ABCs. As ever, Sister Paula stood before the class and led us in the most maddening singsong sham of question and answer—this was the Socratic method she was playing with. How marvellous that we had somehow divined in under a month that A should stand for … Avocado! And were we sure? Oh yes, very.

So stubby were her legs, and arms to match, that she was forever treading on her rosary and then dipping her head to check herself, as though the beads were slung not at her waist but round her neck. And how she
exclaimed
over our sham right answers. My mind was invaded by the sketch of a pullet—pacing and bobbing and rearing back to crow, and stuntedly flapping and clapping over our great successes.

For weeks now, to quell the need to scream I would chant along under my breath. The chant ran on and on like this. Hard and quickly:

This question of the sorcerer's passing through Sister Paula's classroom that day, the precise wording of the hex I threw, has been taken up by those whose qualifications are beyond reproach. And I do not dispute that by the Wednesday of week four my ABCs had spiralled and ramified within me until I had perfected a whole new gamut. As an alternative to Sister Paula's version, my solo began at
M
, for
‘mi,'
of course, and for ‘Mem' in Hebrew …

I did not go on to the letter N. Sister Paula was in such a flap of crossing herself that she had come within one stub pinion of her own miraculous assumption.

My hexachord may not have run to exactly these words and notes that day, but whose childhood recollections are not coloured by the perceptions of others? Elders, adults like Sister Paula, should know to be more careful about exaggeration and its effects on children, and on the truly credulous. Her version of how the sorceress hexed her classroom has followed me for years, and it is greatly vexing that I can do so little against it.

When Grandfather brought me home that day, he described for Isabel the little Inquisition the sisters had held before releasing me. He was scandalized that their chief concern should be whether the others had been infected by my polluted lips.

“Infected?” he snorted. “Such a disease we should all hope to catch….”

So that's what an Inquisition was. To calm Grandfather I told him I thought it might have been much worse. Still, this idea of pollution, infection, was unsettling. Just from my being near the younger girls? I was not so very different. I was good with facts, never forgot what things were or where they came from, and sometimes grasped even the whys. But I knew so little about
how
things were, how they
felt
.