Hunger's Brides

by W. Paul Anderson

  “And the most beautiful thing—when the nuns in Mexico City take their vows, do you know they wear tall crowns of wildflowers? Wedding crowns like the asparagus—but for marrying Christ.”

  “Cinteotl?” she said, wide-eyed.

  “Maybe, maybe not.” I said, mysterious. “But listen to this, when a nun dies, she’s buried wearing the same crown she wore as a girl, NibbleTooth, as a bride. Isn’t that lovely? Of course, the flowers would be a bit dry….”

  And as though the day were indeed blessed, Isabel had been busy with the cattle and had missed lunch herself.

  The next morning at dawn, Amanda woke me wordlessly, an index finger to my lips. She led me out by the hand in my nightgown. It was a cold spring morning in the mountains. We weren’t even dressed—we could see our breath. She was leading me towards the corral. A little nervously my eyes sought out the bull in the chill half light. I wanted to be sure it hadn’t come through the fence. “Amanda …” I said, half complaining and chilly, in my bare feet. But Amanda wasn’t looking at the bull, was almost casually looking away from him. Then I saw. My heart stopped.

  The bull stood stock-still in the centre of the corral. Silent, solid, puffing gouts of steam, like the mountain itself. It shook its head now, wreathed in smoke, and glared at us with its small black eyes as through a green-wood fire. And around its horns was wound, in a long figure eight, a

  dark

  blue

  cornflower

  crown.

  Green had been the colour of my envy that spring. Dark blue, the shade of its leaving.

  My princess of the corn. She spoke to me in dance, in her love of swiftness, in the laughter she was so quick to cover with her hands. In the way the mask of all her wariness dropped away as she taught me a step.

  We ran into the fields that day, and I could almost keep up with her. She stopped and waited for me. As always.

  It was the next day that Xochitl told us about the special place.

  How indignant we were. How could she have waited almost three years to tell us of it?

  “Because you are almost women now.” Xochitl smiled, her eyes a tilt of triangles. How easily we were mollified. But then perhaps she also knew how close Amanda truly was. Xochitl had waited “because the earth up there is jade. And because there are certain dangers….”

  I had come to think the word danger much abused by adults. There were, for example, the wild animals Isabel had once hinted that my sisters wrestled each day just beyond the portals in Nepantla. In the opposite sense, Abuelo was known to backtrack if he felt that his true tales of dangerous bandits or werewolves had brought them too vividly near our firepit. But this was not Xochitl’s way, not the way among women. The special place was safe, but there were precautions to take along the path.

  “To look big, walk close together.”

  As if Amanda and I might walk in any other fashion. “And make noise as you walk.” She spoke now to me directly, and when I saw her eyes twinkling with this, I knew it really would be all right.

  Though miztli† often hunted during the day, jaguars rarely did, and there was a much better place for them, where the deer and the pigs came for salt. “Which is why—listen carefully now—you follow the south bank of the river, and do not follow the first stream up or the second. The third. Where it joins the river is a deep pool. There is a place to cross over. Then look to Iztaccihuatl. You see straight above you a line of waterfalls. The highest is at the snow line.” We were to repeat it now for her. First me, then Amanda.

  “It was a place for the women of our family,” said Xochitl. “It is the Heart of the Earth, of the goddess of the earthquake. And of our grandmother, Toci. Among the men, only Ocelotl knew the way.”

  “His mist has not scattered,” said Amanda, which meant he was respected. Xochitl nodded in approval and told us the Heart of the Earth was the jaguar’s tutor. His pelt is on her throne.

  “Did Ocelotl go there for visions?” I asked, casually.

  She wasn’t easily fooled.

  “Could be, Ixpetz. But I think mostly he slept. Beside the spring you will see the stones he used for his temazcal.† It is for my daughters now, who have made my hair white and my face very wide.”

  Just as we were turning to go, Xochitl called to us. “Here … There is enough for breakfast and lunch. But when you look down to the hills and the sun is two palm-widths above—start down. Never later.”

  We set out at a fast walk, which threatened at every step to break into a trot. I held Amanda’s hand tight to keep her from breaking away altogether.

  “Did you hear, Amanda? She didn’t even tell us to keep it to ourselves!” Amanda nodded proudly. But if she had, I asked, wouldn’t we have been right to take it as a grievous insult? And wasn’t it beautiful about the Heart of the Earth, and …

  And so we went as we would each time, to what became our special place. East through the corn, shooing deer, which would cheekily stop again after clearing the fence—a high fence whose lowest rails we ducked through—in one soaring, effortless bound. So calmly they hung at the top of their arc that it seemed they might nod off up there in the air. They were like her, tense in stillness and in flight utterly at peace.

  Ten minutes above the river, the path reared up more steeply. The stream by which we had found our way slowly fell away to the left. For half an hour we climbed a long incline of uniform width, pitched as steeply as the stairs up to the hacienda’s watchtower. On either side sloped away banks of shale and what seemed almost to be coal but with a glassy sheen. To our fancy, this incline appeared as a nose, one we followed to the place Amanda named Ixayac. Its Face.

  The top of the incline ended in a sheer wall five times our height, but up the surface of which a zigzag of handholds and footholds stood out as clearly as rungs. Amanda scrambled up without hesitation, and I clambered gratefully after her. This climb, I saw, was what would keep us safe from anything on four legs following us.

  We stood on a deep bench, the lower of two. Each of its brows sprouted a score or so of stunted pines. The stream ran out of a thicket in front of us and dropped away a little distance to the left. Amanda walked right up to the edge where the stream fell. I inched up cautiously behind her. It smashed and frayed and tumbled its way into a deep hollow of rubble and shale. From there it ran more smoothly along the north cheek of the incline before disappearing into the trees.

  We sat down on the ledge. A stone’s throw out from us, three grey rock doves flapped a broad arc across our field of view. Eventually I let my feet swing out into space, though not quite so freely as Amanda did. The world we looked out upon could have been another continent. But this was the other continent fixed in the imagination of the Europeans I had read. This was the great glittering lake they had seen or heard or dreamt about. It snaked its way north up the valley until it lost itself in the blue-grey of distance. And there was the white city on the lake, plotted, unlike any city in Europe, on a grid perfectly aligned to the cardinal directions and without defensive walls. Grandfather said Cortés’s soldiers wept—as if they had had been overtaken by a dream of death and now stared out upon a warriors’ heaven. A city without walls to defend or overcome … imagine it.

  Just then, Amanda pointed out the small wedge of a falcon stooping on the doves. In three heartbeats it fell through them—an axe head splitting a block. In a tangle of esses, two doves flew on.

  I had thought it far off, this place I’d read so much about. Before the Conquest, Tenochtitlan was a vast island city, an ivory eye—or, with its grid of streets, a white sunflower framed in leaves of an iridescent green. These were the chinampas, or floating gardens. The island was tethered to the shore by the mooring cables of long causeways running through shades of blue. The city was bone white, but its temples were painted in the gaudy hues of parrot plumes and jewels. And the pyramids of ruby and emerald and sapphire were as the flower’s jewelled nectary. The pyramids were gone now and the chinampas much reduced, but the air
was still clear enough to see the bell tower of what could only be the cathedral, and beside it the Viceroy’s palace.

  We sat on the ledge, swinging our feet, attempting little verses on what we saw. We decided there and then, like children nursing a candy, to make no further explorations until our next visit, so as to draw out the pleasure of discovery. After just an hour, we were ready to start down.

  At the river we stopped to watch in wonder the enormous trout that converged at the bottom of the pool. There seemed to be a vent, some kind of spring at which they jostled and fed. And then it was dusk, which fell swiftly up the mountain. Amanda and I hurried through the cactus field, the richness of the day steeping quietly in us.

  Near the hacienda stood a small enclosure, just back from the river where it winds through the cactus plot. Four bare poles under a thatch of maguey spikes, and a killing floor of smooth stone slabs. Incised in the floor was a channel to run blood straight into the water, which could be sluiced clean with just a bucket or two. The floor had always been here, and on it may once have stood an altar. It was useful now for slaughtering livestock so as not to attract scavengers to the house.

  My heart sank to see Isabel look up as she and a workman butchered a lamb. This might befall a lamb if it were to break a leg, or perhaps come home late.

  Isabel sent Amanda on to the house. I stood silently as they finished in the gloom. She had fetched up her skirts and tucked them between her thighs, and was plastered to her elbows in a black mud. I saw finally that it was blood, as she squatted there like some vengeful idol to the beauty of dusk.

  She washed up, sending the workman ahead with the meat. She had not asked, and seemed not to listen to my mumbled evasions as to where we had been till such an hour. After administering a spanking with her customary efficiency and power she asked if I remembered yet. Grandfather’s seventieth birthday. Which I must have known he attached significance to, and today of all days to leave him alone when he counted on me….

  I blurted, “If I was so late, why didn’t you read for him?”

  My ear rang and buzzed for an hour from a slap more impulsively delivered than the spanking.

  “Come in when you’ve stopped.”

  That night I tossed and turned and ground my teeth—to be gone again, up to Ixayac—or anywhere. The place where my true life was. Not this, not here. This was not my life.

  What kept me for so many hours so close to tears was not the ringing in my ear or even the humiliation. It was shame—scalding and caustic and vile. He did count on me.

  “Angel, will you …? My eyes are tired.” And I would read for him—enchantingly, as any great actress would. That was our game. I had never thought of it as his needing me. Even though now, no matter how stunningly I read, how emphatically—how loud, I could never quite wake one of his eyes. The right. The one he kept turned away from me at the firepit. The truth was, he often just listened now, nodding sagely at the flames as I spoke.

  That night dealt me a succession of confused dreams, and on each card the emblem of my guilt. Snake, horse, lion, falcon, manatí. Each appearance brief, each somehow me—a fugitive, a figure like Proteus wriggling through a thousand shapes to flee to Egypt with his sea calves. Or the daughter of Erysichthon—always unclean, no matter how many her guises.

  I was still close to tears when I saw Xochitl the next morning.

  “Two palm-widths above the horizon. Just like you told us, Xochita.”

  “Tell me about the trout.”

  I knew she asked this by way of consoling me. But how did she know they’d be there?

  “As a girl I watched them,” she said. “Just like you two. We had to practice a lot to spear them.”

  “You speared them?”

  Amanda nodded. “They’re quick.”

  “Yes, NibbleTooth, but also because they are not there.”

  “After, you mean?” I still didn’t see.

  “No—then. You see a fish. And there is a fish. But not there … over here.” As she said this, she had turned up her right palm, now the left. “Not yet, eh, Ixpetz? Next time take a long stick. Our spears were higher than our arms could reach and straight. Put the stick in—”

  “It bends!”

  “Near the bottom, where the hot water comes, it bends more. The stick is straight. But not always. The fish is. But not there.”

  “Xochita, this is just refraction,” I said, eager to explain.

  “No, this is god.”

  “It’s only light.”

  “Look more, Ixpetz. You will see the double you keep asking about.”

  She had never once given me a straight answer about any of this, nor had she ever been the one to bring it up.

  “Sometimes we say ixiptla, sometimes mask. Or double. Or … twins.”

  “Why so many, Xochita, so many words?”

  She made a funny face, the face of an insatiable child pleading for one more treat—a face just such as mine. “Maybe we were never sure we understood. Twins, doubles … Who can say, Ixpetz—one of them might be right.”

  How did she always manage it? She could make me want to laugh in the blink of an eye.

  “Sometimes we say they are a couple. Like those two mountains.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “the lovers are also between the fish.”

  “Maybe very good, Ixpetz.”

  “Fish,” I said, trying not to smile.

  “Fish.”

  “Not one fish.”

  “No.”

  “Not two.”

  “No.”

  “Here and there.”

  “Yes, Ixpetz. Near and far.”

  “Many masks—one face.”

  “Not one.”

  “Faceness—face. Only ‘face.’”

  “Ahh …”

  “And we’re needed, somehow.”

  “We bend the stick!” Amanda said.

  “Very good, NibbleTooth.”

  “But, Xochita, if you stand directly over the water,” I said, “the stick …”

  She shook her head sadly. “You think too much.”

  “That’s no answer, Xochitita,” I crooned. “Please?”

  She thought about this. “In the world there is no such place. To stand.”

  “Above god,” I added, hoping she might say more.

  “Help me grind the corn—both of you. I am late again.”

  “I have a question.”

  “Grind.”

  Not even the poetry of Xochitl’s reticence prepared us for this place beyond the trout pool that she had bequeathed to us. By the time we had started down I knew, and for once kept it to myself, that it was not to our maturity she had trusted. Such beauty kept its own secrets. We never told anyone.

  We planned to go the very next day. But so many things, it seemed, had to happen before we could make our way back up to Ixayac, to discover the hot spring, the falcon nest, the plunge pool below the little waterfall. It seemed like years.

  †melliza, Spanish for twin; cocoa, twin, snake or dragon in Nahuatl

  †the Lord of Near and Far

  †Bee-OH-shuh

  †prickly pear

  †pumas

  †sweat bath

  THE HUNT

  In which the editor obtrudes, in antiquated fashion, with some exposition.

  FROM HER NOTES it appears Beulah’s researches began in earnest after the first in a series of CBC radio broadcasts on the life of Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz.

  The first aired in the spring of 1990, toward the end of Beulah’s freshman year. Sor Juana had belonged to Beulah’s private world for almost as long as she could remember. When she was about twelve, her father, a surgeon, brought home from Mexico a collection of the nun’s poetry. He himself had had to read her in grade school in Spain. Possibly he hoped to encourage his daughter to keep up her Spanish.18 On the cover of that first poetry collection was a rich portrait in oils: a beautiful, elegant nun, seated at a writing desk before a wall of impressive tomes. The coll
ection became for Beulah a talisman and a refuge. That her parents played up a casual physical resemblance between this shining exemplar and their brilliant, volatile daughter was perhaps innocent enough. A goad wrapped in a compliment. The sort of thing parents do.

  Colleagues had on more than one occasion mentioned Beulah Limosneros to me. But in that freshman year she would have been simply too gamine. As I later calculated, she’d turned seventeen barely a week before classes began. Naturally I was curious. But when in 1992 I became her honours adviser it was only because Relkoff, the one real poet on staff, had run afoul of the new department head and gone on sabbatical to Ireland. Which left us to divide up his responsibilities. Beulah fell to me.

  When I saw her name on my class list that fall, I assumed she’d enrolled in my seminar on early American literature to curry favour with her new adviser. A notion of which I was quickly disabused.

  She was at least two years younger than anyone in the room. She spoke only rarely, but from the beginning her interventions were so incisive that she seemed to preside over our discussions as a silent moderator. Only part of the effect was owing to her unsettling physical presence. She had turned nineteen by then, and was very much in season.

  She signed term papers with her student number. She was of course alone in doing this. Metaphoric, quicksilver—a dash of sulphur—her papers were like adventures in alchemy. I had no trouble matching them to her. For an undergraduate’s, her style was perfectly unscholarly (which is to say, presumptuously confident). Yet, for the novelty of her ideas and her obvious mastery of the material, my colleagues had been handicapping her as our most promising aspirant in a long while.

  One would set her a perfectly standard task for an undergraduate, say, a ten-page discussion of Anne Bradstreet and meanings of the number four in her “Four Elements,” “Four Seasons,” “Four Ages of Man,” “Four Monarchies.” Or, John Smith’s Pocahontas—Saviour or Saved, Traitor or Translator? Both are decent enough topics. Instead, Beulah’s first paper was on the use of poetic figures in a work of subatomic physics.