Hunger's Brides

by W. Paul Anderson

  Ancient Egypt of the enigmatic forms … priests and priestesses with the heads of dogs or bulls or birds, like ibis-headed Thoth, inventor of writing and guide of souls into the western deserts. Avidly now I read about the teachings of a great sage who lived in the Egyptian desert at the time of Moses: Hermes Trismegistus, divine messenger! His secret texts had been only recently rediscovered but surely the riddles veiled therein contained great natural magic and the highest wisdom. If my excitement was burgeoning, Magister Kircher’s was truly palpable. Reading him now was almost to be present as the greatest scholar of the modern world hailed his great forerunner: I, Athanasius Kircher, and the new sages of Europe salute you from afar. He was hopeful—on the verge, one could feel it—of recovering the most powerful Hermetic formulas. Light from darkness … attraction at a distance … a jar so tightly sealed as to exclude even air…. Was it really true that the Reverend Kircher had had himself lowered into Vesuvius to study its crater right after an eruption? How he would love Panoayan. Such marvels he could teach us. And what a master of decorum he must be to preserve the dignity of the cassock amidst such updrafts.

  Clearly, great new discoveries were imminent: for to the classical instruments and faculties of mind, the new sages of Europe were now learning to couple close observation and measurement. And by the great Jesuit’s shining example I was learning that the most powerful instrument of all, as Aristotle himself had said, was admiratio, the faculty of marvelling at the world—and surely I was acquiring some of this myself. From the Reverend’s description it was child’s play to construct a magic lantern, and through it project not just light but forms and likenesses. And what a sensation it created in our dining room when, after dinner one night, I projected my first image onto a sheet draped over the aparador.† I did not much care for Kircher’s own first choice: a painted devil for terrifying sinners. An image of our volcano gouting beet juice turned out to be quite startling enough.

  The best thing was, Reverend Kircher wasn’t even dead, according to Abuelo. I had never read a living writer before—as far as I knew, but then I was fairly sure one couldn’t tell the living from the dead just by reading them. How I would love to visit him one day.

  The only trouble in imagining any such journey would be in keeping its real purpose from Amanda, who in the afternoons and evenings had Xochitl teaching her all the ancient songs and dances and medicines, and secrets only to be handed down directly from mother to daughter and never otherwise spoken of—potions, perhaps, or incantations and who knew what else. Whatever Amanda might feel about my afternoons and evenings, I was not the only one with a parallel life. I was determined at least to keep Egypt for myself. But somewhere on the road to Reverend Kircher’s Rome I was bound to let something slip—for if building the lantern had been easy, leaving Amanda out of it had not been easy at all. Harder still to work at the harsh riddles of Hermes alone. She was good at riddles. We had always worked at them together.

  And now the Greek had turned against me—as they will even when bringing gifts—for it was almost as if the Plutarch of the dull but harmless selections we had been reading had now forgotten Greece entirely, such was his new-found passion for Egypt. Suddenly this new Plutarch was running on—without the slightest discretion—about the proverbs of the Alexandrines and, worst of all, about Isis, she who weeps, a deity so august as to seem the sum of all the goddesses of Greece. I would have to find something else for us to read. Quickly.

  It had been raining since dawn. The light was soft and grey, the air crisp. Snug under blankets and in rough woollen cloaks Amanda and I sat under the eaves, but in front of my room instead of the library, so as not to disturb Abuelo. Casually I mentioned that, like Plutarch, Hesiod was also from Boeotia.

  “Place of Wild Oxen,” Amanda said, instantly. After this auspicious beginning it would only be a matter of time before I persuaded her to try Works and Days.

  When she agreed—reluctantly—to the change I ran for the book. Instead of walking the full circuit of the arcade I sprinted through the rain—not wanting to give her time to change her mind. The courtyard already lay mostly under water. The rain barrels were frothing and fulminating as if they themselves had been dunked. I knew Amanda was watching, and to make her laugh I ran right under a waterspout to the library door, where I called in to ask Abuelo for the Hesiod. He didn’t seem to be reading in there at all but was just sitting, chin propped on a hand, staring out the window at the rain. He turned to see me standing there dripping water.

  “Escuintle,” he chided, shaking his head. “You will catch your death.”

  He found Works and Days so quickly that I wondered if Hesiod wasn’t a favourite of his. Shuffling back to the door he glanced down at the book, and then up at me with a sad little half-smile. “An excellent choice, Angelita. Your author would be at home in this weather.” As I reached out, he straightened a little and stuck out his belly.

  “Espérate. Dry off those hands first. Here, on my shirt. Now don’t you dare run back across.”

  “Sí, Abuelito, “ I said and for him I ran, chill and wet, the long way around.

  “And dry yourself off before you start reading!” he called across the courtyard. “You’re liable to be sitting out there all day.”

  I read to Amanda for a while, for the sheer pleasure of the words. The text was plain and strong, about hard work in the fields, about the calendar and crops and when to plant. It felt like a book about surviving hardship itself. Crops failing, and weather, and debt.

  Just then, as a thunderclap stole the breath from my chest and the hail erupted, it happened I was reading—my voice rising more each instant—Hesiod’s lines on surVIVING WINTER. North winds, frost, and hardship enough to curve an old man like a wheel. A hail of stones fell as big as avocado pits bounding crazily all about us like whole fields of grasshoppers startled underfoot. Then the hail and the rain just stopped.

  The courtyard lay like a case of slate beneath a slurry of pearls, and in the air moved scents of tree sap and hail-mown grass. Cloud hung from the hills just as the breath did from our lips. Ice! We played in the hail like besotted jewellers, letting pearls stream from our fingers.

  When we could no longer feel them, we skittered back to our rocking chairs and books and burrowed under the blankets. Amanda was clearly touched by Hesiod’s plain words for life on the land, and intrigued, as I was, by the idea of the four ages and races of Man. But we needed to read something warmer. And yet if I were to switch books on her again …

  I knew exactly how to do it.

  “Wait now, NibbleTooth. Hesiod keeps talking about the gods’ gift of good crops and bread, and he’s told us twice about Pandora—which means what again?”

  “Gift …”

  “‘Universal gift,’ and yet he blames her for dragging Man down to the Age of Iron. The first Woman—again. But even so, that still meant Man had managed to drag himself down from Gold to Silver to Bronze without any help from her. And she was only created for this fellow Epimetheus† because Zeus’d ordered it. Looks to me like this was the afterthought. And now Hesiod has the gall to call her a plague on men who eat bread, which are like tortillas here—and what men eat those?”

  “All men.”

  “She did not ask for that old jar, anyway, and who put the Spites in there in the first place? And she was the one who found the gift of Hope in a jar the men had thought empty. That reminds me, Helen is so famous for starting the Trojan War, but a certain poet was struck blind till he finally admitted she was never in Troy. Now Achilles, he made trouble without anyone’s help, but he gets called a great warrior and Pandora a plague on men. Thetis wouldn’t even have had Achilles if she hadn’t been ravished by Peleus. What desperate tricks didn’t she try, to stay out of trouble—fire, water, lion, snake, squid she changed into, anything to get away from him. Pandora, Helen, Thetis, Isi—I ask you, NibbleTooth, what of their hardship and grief, and what of poor Penelope, so many years without Odysseus? Well I’ll tell
you: Grief is a plague on the women who bake bread for men. Or tortillas….”

  For some moments Amanda had been eyeing me suspiciously as I plunged on.

  “Are these not like the stories your mother tells of CloudSerpent pursuing his sister? And did you know that Thetis rode dolphins?—which swim fast and chase really fast fish, very much as otters do, which reminds me of the seals of King Proteus of Egy—and amazing sea journeys and of another great book by Homer …”

  Amanda sat angled toward me in the rocking chair. Under a mound of blankets all that could be seen were her hands holding Hesiod and—in the shortening intervals between the clouds of her breath—the grimace of exasperation pulling at a corner of her mouth as I myself ran out steam.

  “You want to read something else now.”

  Disapproval, exasperation, but not anger. Splendid.

  “Yes, NibbleTooth—the Odyssey.”

  The weather cleared enough to see WhiteLady again, white as we had never seen her. She and Popocatepetl rose into the sky entirely cloaked in a light shawl of snow. Up one flank the fire track was an immense scald—steaming still from valley to treeline. It stopped at the northernmost edge of the western face. Ixayac was safe.

  Surely we could go now.

  As the weather cleared, Isabel rode out to inspect the damage. We had lost half the apple crop and all the vegetables to the hail, and the corn that we ourselves had cut down in the field nearest the house. Worse, Isabel had seen not one but two pumas. She made me promise to stay close to the house for another day or two.

  Amanda and I did not get to the Odyssey. Even as the weather improved, I grew ill. I lay in my room, fussed and hovered over by Amanda, nursed by Xochitl on bitter infusions of herbs and a chicken stock seasoned with purplish chipotle peppers and lime. Of the first day I remember little but dreams and the lusty bawling of cattle pent close to the house. We seemed closer to Ithaca than Ixayac, so with a sigh I asked Xochitl, would she at least tell us something more about this place it seemed we would never get back to? Amanda was sitting at the end of the bed, Xochitl on a chair next to me, the bowl of broth in her lap. The shutters were closed. The whiteness of her hair glowed softly in the dim light.

  “What have I told you two already?” she asked, testing us.

  “It is a place for women,” Amanda said. “The Heart of the Earth, Toci—”

  “Goddess of the earthquake,” I chimed in, “our grandmother.”

  “Good. You have not forgotten quite everything. But I did not tell you how.”

  “How …?”

  “It is as the moon, who waxes and wanes, that Toci instructs the Night. As she who is reborn in blood each month, she teaches the jaguar. As the warrior in childbirth, she wears his pelt on her throne. And in this she is also called Tlaelcuani, in licking the gore of birth from the child, and of love from the father.”

  “Filth …”

  “Sip. There … Yes, Ixpetz. But the filth she eats is rarely her own. And it is she who gave women the temazcal. And tell me, did you find its walls still standing?”

  “Xochita, we don’t know,” I said.

  “How is that, did you not go up?”

  “Yes, Mother,” Amanda said, “but we didn’t want to see everything at once.”

  The triangles of Xochita’s eyes unfolded like little boxes.

  “Hup!” There was that laugh we so rarely heard. Like a bird with a hiccup.

  “You girls. I had forgotten how it is, to be so young….” Though she’d said this with a smile, we were wounded. Xochita had told us about the special place only because we were almost women. Reading our expressions she added, “No, what you did was good, a sign of respect. Or am I mistaken.”

  “But it’s been days and we still haven’t seen anything!”

  “You will soon, so lie back. Sip. More … good. Next to the hot spring you will see the walls of the sweat bath, where the midwife once went for her instruction. When I was a girl, two women of our village and the midwife climbed up there together at the full moon. They waited there almost a month, until their time.

  Amanda nodded. What else had she already been told?

  “But what did they do up there, Xochi, for all that time?”

  There were baths to take, and medicines. Prayers and songs, for the midwife and the mother to offer to Cihuacoatl and Tlazolteotl, guardians of childbirth. There were readings to make of the baby’s luck in the grains of thrown corn.

  “Prophecy!—Tlazolteotl was a wizard.”

  “As the jaguar’s tutor, she wears the skirt of black and red,” Xochi answered, not exactly disagreeing. “It is why Ocelotl made the journey often. This climb, I made many times as a midwife. I was planning to go again for myself. For Amanda. But my luck was not so good. Something slid … then I fell and could not climb.”

  For a moment her gaze went to the bowl cooling in her lap. As she looked up her voice was firm. “It is a place of cleansing, a place for thought and care. A woman born under the sign 1 Ocelotl, as I was, goes to Tlazolteotl for steadfastness. She wears a crown such as you once gave to Amanda. But not of maguey—hers was of CottonFlower. Like me.”

  Her face was playful and almost shy.

  “You?” I said.

  “Ichcaxochitl,” Amanda said. CottonFlower. She might at least have told me.

  “You did not know my full name, did you Ixpetz….”

  On the third day I was able to get up and walk about a bit. All morning Amanda was helping her mother prepare a feast for a mystery guest the following night.

  But what an uproar had been coming from the corrals since yesterday. Finally I wobbled out to see.

  What had sounded the day before like the cattle of Peleus being savaged by a sea wolf was in fact only slightly less dramatic—our cows being bred to the black bull from Chimalhuacan. This normally took place in the far paddock but with the pumas about and the jaguar attack some time back, mother had brought the bull nearer the house. Two days in bed and already life had passed me by.

  Abuelo intercepted me between the library and the kitchen. “Are you sure you’re strong enough to be up? I should have dried you off properly myself.”

  “I’m feeling much better, Abuelito.”

  He didn’t say anything for a minute. Normally he would have had his arm around my shoulders by now. “Maybe you should stay inside, Juanita. We’ve been seeing a lot of snakes in the yard since the fire.”

  Snakes. Was there to be a plague of snakes now? All this time Amanda and I should have been reading Exodus! Standing next to Abuelo, with the portal so excruciatingly near, I had visions of our captivity here being drawn out by spiders next, then scorpions. Vicious termites, butterflies …

  “Angelina, would you mind coming to read something for me? There are some pages in bad repair. With all the smoke in the air and the dust, my eyes …”

  I saw, finally, that he’d come out expressly to keep me from the corral, yet his green eyes were indeed red and bleary, as though he’d been the one ill. Titanic on the day of the fire, he had seemed subdued since.

  Cancionero general. A waterlogged and mouldered copy of an anthology of lyrics. It looked three centuries old, but proved to be scarcely half that. The selection truly was hard to read, but as much for its beauty as for the damage to its pages. Verses by Jorge Manrique. In time, I would come to know this, his most famous poem, as if it were my own—the one, when the day came, it was a mercy not to have to write.

  Recuerde el alma dormida,

  avive el seso e despierte

  contemplando

  cómo se passa la vida,

  cómo se viene la muerte

  tan callando …

  It was this poem Grandfather asked me to read now at the little table under the library window. After the fourth stanza he held up his hand. “There. That was the part I had been wanting to hear again.” We sat quietly a moment afterwards. “I must have told you. Manrique’s father, the Count of Paredes, was an Iberian hero. The second Cid,
they called him, so great was his glory. Founder of the Order of Santiago, our highest military order. And fighting at his side was his son, our great poet.” As Abuelo added this, his chest was big with emotion. He rested a trembling hand on my arm as was his habit, while for a moment his eyes wandered into the empty space above the courtyard. “Then the father would die, then the son—both defending Queen Isabela.”

  “But Abuelo, we live in America.”

  “One does not cease to be a loyal subject of the Crown. Not by mere accident of geography. Without los Manrique, truly there would be no Spain today.”

  I asked Grandfather to tell me about tomorrow night’s dinner guest. I knew he was a military officer. Yes, of the rank of lance-captain. Isabel had met him while chaperoning Josefa and María at the ball in Amecameca. A ball? Yes, Juanita, two nights ago.

  At the courtyard’s centre stood the well, a small turret of mortared fieldstone. On the east side of it, a big armspan away, lay the firepit, bounded by squared blocks of the same origin and shape as the flagstones but thicker. Within that ring the flags had been pulled up; outside it, lengths of log lay in a gnarled circlet girdling the pit. Stripped of their bark, they were otherwise indistinguishable from those around a real explorer’s campfire. And this was exactly how Abuelo had made it feel for us, from the very first night of our arrival from our old home in Nepantla.

  On a clear evening, if we went there straight after dinner, from behind the hills to the west a good deal of light would still be coming up, the stories flowing as the light ebbed, infused, in that fading, with a loneliness. It would be just the two of us now. My sisters had lost interest. Amanda was not allowed.

  In that silence I would sometimes think about our first night in Panoayan, the only time Amanda had ever been there with us. María and Josefa were swinging at cobwebs with brooms. Xochitl was in the kitchen. It was full dark. Abuelo emerged from his room with a lantern and, tucked under his arm, a rectangular board. I caught sight of something else in his left hand. It was the first fire-bow I had seen.