The Hummingbird's Daughter (28 page)

Thirty-one

TERESITA SLEPT IN HER HUGE BED between Josefina and Gabriela.

At nineteen, Gabriela was older than the other girls. Josefina was a plump and giggly sixteen-year-old with dark skin and a small mole beside her nose. Teresita, fifteen now, was a year older than her mother had been when she’d been born.

“I am in love with your father,” Gabriela confessed.

“Me too!” blurted Josefina.

“You and everybody else,” said Teresita as they burrowed in the covers and whispered. “And Fina—you’re in love with all vaqueros.”

“Oh yes!” Josefina agreed.

“No, Teresa,” Gabriela insisted. “I mean I
love
him.”

“Yes. I know.”

“Love him, as in love him?” said La Fina. “Or love him, as in have his babies
LOVE
him?”

“Babies!”

“Ay Dios!”

“Ay!” cried Teresita.

Laughter.

“What will I do?”

“Marry him!” La Fina said.

“He is married, tonta!”

“Oh. I forgot.”

Teresita sighed, looked at Josefina, and made a face.

“Gaby will be my mother,” she said.

The three girls burst out laughing.

Teresita turned to Gaby and put out her hand.

“Hello, Mother, how do you do?”

“Hello, Daughter! Clean your room!”

They laughed louder.

Beneath them, Tomás banged on the ceiling of the library to get them to quiet down. He would have to add a nonnegotiable bedtime to Teresita’s curriculum.

They put their hands over their mouths and gasped as they tried to silence their hilarity. They heard his voice coming up the stairs:

“Do I have to come up there?”

“Oh please do,” crooned Gaby. “Papasito!”

This made them scream into their fists, and they heard a defeated Tomás slam his door in anger.

After a while, they grew still and all lay on their backs, feeling the house tick into silence. Moonlight washed over them, turning the covers silver in the darkness. A western breeze furled the curtains. Teresita had set some herbs on fire in a small pot to keep mosquitoes out of the room. They watched the small red flickers of the fire make patterns on the walls. Her dried herbs hung in aromatic bunches from the heavy square beams above them.

These were the best nights she would ever have, lying beside her two friends, blind still to what was coming.

“Take us on a trip,” Josefina said.

“Do you want to?”

“Yes.”

Gaby nodded her head.

“Yes,” she said. “Take us.”

“Are you sure?”

“Oh yes.”

She had discovered a new talent in bed with these girls. It had come to her as a realization a few months before. She simply knew one night that she could capture their dreams and direct them. She could not explain how it happened, or why. But if she concentrated, she could take the girls on journeys as if they were flying in the wind.

“Where should we go?” she asked.

Josefina shuddered in expectation.

“I don’t know!” she said.

“We went to the ocean last time,” Gaby reminded her. “We saw ships all covered in lights.”

“Oh yes!” sighed Josefina. “The people were dancing!”

“I have only seen the ocean on our travels at night,” Teresita confessed.

“Me too,” said Josefina. “Y tú, Gaby?”

“I have seen the sea,” Gabriela said. “We go often to Guaymas. It was as it was in the dream. You can smell the salt in the air. The breeze never stops.”

“We were really there,” Teresita told them. “It was more than a dream.”

“I believe you,” said Josefina.

“Maybe,” said Gabriela.

“I have never seen a city,” Teresita said.

“Me neither,” said Gaby.

“I have been to a city!” La Fina said.

“What city have you been to?” demanded Gaby.

“Alamos!”

Gaby laughed.

“Ay, cómo eres tonta, Fina! Alamos is not a city. Es un pueblo, but it is not a city! Cities are great things! Paris is a city!”

La Josefina sighed: Paris!

“New York, or Mexico City!”

Teresita smiled.

“Cities,” she said, “are like a hundred towns all put together.”

“One thousand towns!” Gaby whispered. “A city is like the ship we saw—all lights and avenues as far as you can see!”

“How do you know?” asked Fina.

“I just know.”

“Hundreds of lights,” murmured Teresita, as she closed her eyes.

She reached out to them under the covers. They put their hands in hers. La Fina wrapped her legs around Teresita’s leg. She liked the contact, but she was also afraid to fly. No number of assurances from Teresita made her trust that she wasn’t going to fall.

The three held hands.

Teresita said, “Feet—go to sleep. Go on, you’ve had a hard day. Now sleep.”

She worked her way up their bodies, and they grew drowsy as she talked.

Slowly, her soft mattress felt as if it were surging, billowing beneath them. And they grew lighter. First, it strained against their backs. But soon, the sheet lifted from the bed as if it were being shaken out in the morning, and they rode the billows.

“We are rising, rising, can you feel it? We are light now as cottonwood fluff. Feel it. The earth falls away. We have been prisoners of the ground, and now it releases its grip on us. Yes. Yes. The air moves us freely. We are like water. The air is like water. We are water. We are clouds. We are air.”

And then they were above the billows. They were in midair, held up by its freshness, its love. The air loved them—they could feel it.

“Is it angels?” Josefina whispered.

“Shhh,” said Teresita.

The air moved through their hair like water. They were moving.

“Keep your eyes closed,” she whispered. “Just a little longer. Don’t look.”

Sounds expanded all around them, and beneath them. The closeness of the room suddenly felt as if it were falling open into winds and echoes and river water shushing somewhere below. Dog voices were tiny as crickets.

“South,” she said.

They felt themselves drift south, as if carried by a fresh spring in a grove of trees.

“Now look.”

They opened their eyes.

The library was rich with shades of red, gold, brown, flickering in the glow of oil lamps.

“I am in love,” Tomás told Huila.

“Tell me something new,” she said.

She took one of his cigars from its humidor and lit it without asking. He was beyond complaining about Huila’s actions.

“No, I am serious.”

“You were serious about the tortilla girl and the milkmaid before her.”

“That, that was not love.”

“Yes, I know,” Huila said.

“What do I do now?”

“Be a man.”

“Eh?”

“Be a man. If you love her, stand up for her. Face her father and face your wife. Stop whining like a pinche little girl and stand up like a man. If you want to claim the girl, claim the girl. Then learn to be a better man than you were before.”

He nodded.

“Because, frankly,” Huila continued, “you are a total failure as a man in my opinion.”

She left the room.

He sat. The girls were quiet upstairs. The woman he wanted was lying in bed with his bastard daughter.

Tomás sighed and closed his eyes. If there was a God, he might just be going to Hell.

When their eyes opened, they were looking up into the giant tide of stars. Gaby turned her head and saw the edge of a small cloud as it drifted past her. The girls somersaulted slowly in the air until they were facing the earth.

The Sierra rose and fell in soft blue undulations of stone. Snow on its ridges burned pale violet in the moonlight.

“Look.”

A scatter of silver coins to the west was the Pacific Ocean.

Clouds swallowed them. They passed through misty cold towers and burst back into clear air. Their eyelids glowed with moonlight.

They drifted south, south, so high they could see villages pass beneath them like small stains of light on the ground, as if a cup full of candle glow had spilled on a ruffled tablecloth. A wedge of migrating birds passed far from them, tiny as butterflies, gray against the deeper darkness of Mexico. Into more clouds and then, as the cloud banks parted, they saw a vastness of glitter. Dizzying expanses of light. A thousand, ten thousand small lights in lines and avenues stretching to the black mountains.

“Streets,” Teresita said.

Yes, streets. They saw now the carriages clopping down the boulevards. Buildings, houses, dark parks. Boats in canals.

Music rose from a far plaza. Cooking smoke. Song lifted to their ears. Voices. Trumpets. They fell to earth ensnared in the scents of the city: perfume, cigars, charcoal, steam, garbage, water, horses, carne asada.

Their feet touched wet cobbles.

“Mexico City,” Teresita said.

My Friend, Cantúa . . .

No, that wouldn’t do.

Cantúa, You Bastard!

No! No! Perhaps a letter to Aguirre! But not to Cantúa!

He dipped his pen again and bent to the task.

My Esteemed and Gracious Friend, Honorable Señor Cantúa,

I sit here in my library, haunted and worried by the inexplicable directions in which life and the human heart often travel. Believe me when I tell you I never meant any disrespect to you or to your lovely daughter when I began to visit you with regularity. I did, I confess, have my eye on the girl. Forgive me! You would be a saint to forgive me! But my dear maestro, master of the green chile burrito and the carne adobada tacos! You, sir, are the father of an angel! And I, your humble servant, have fallen under her spell.

Oh, virginal untainted maidenhood! I will defend it to my dying breath! I urge you to understand that I am a father, too!! I will never touch a strand of her hair, before God and the Virgin I vow it!!!!

Oh, how my head throbs and my heart grieves me. If it were only not so, but it is so. I love her, Sir. I love Gabriela! I do.

Forgive me this indiscretion.

But you are not only a father, Sir, you are a man!

May we meet at the soonest possible moment to settle this matter?

I will, of course, defer to your judgment, recognizing that you are her father. But of course! I, too, am a father! Do not forget! Blessed duty bestowed upon us by The Almighty!

Certainly, if we can make some familial arrangement between the Cantúas and the Urreas, the hacienda will be at your disposal, and all its riches will also be yours.

I await your speedy response with my breath held and my knees bent: one hand on my heart, and the other raised to God Himself in supplication!

Very Sincerely and Faithfully Yours, I          

Remain, Awaiting Your Kind Understanding

And Merciful Judgment,                                

Your Future Son,                                            

Don Tomás Urrea,                                         

La Hacienda de Cabora, Sonora                    

He’d have Segundo deliver it in the morning.