“Wait,” I said, leaping up. My surprise. I had almost forgotten.
A specialty of our region has become all but indispensable to the women of Mexico. It is a cream made from a butter of avocado and wild honey, widely thought to stay the ravages of time, or at least those of our sun and the high mountain air. We of course cared for nothing of this yet—but oh the glorious feel and fragrance on the skin. Seeing what I’d brought, Amanda’s almond eyes grew round as owls’.
Giggling we smeared it over each other, an aromatic lard. Scarcely had I finished Amanda but we were batting away the first wasps. In no time at all, we stood aswirl in them.
“Spin,” I yelled, spinning like a top to keep them from landing. We ran up to our thighs into the water but still they buzzed around. One landed now on her.
The only thing left to do was plunge headlong into the coldest water we had ever felt. And yet we waited: the game began….
From that day forward, after the temazcal, after the masks and the hip-deep dip in the hot spring, we would bring out the honey cream and slather each other as fast as we could. Then as the wasps swirled we held still, held still, there at the edge by the most supremely icy spot, beneath a waterfall not half an hour old, so recently was it snow. Nothing but a peltful of wasps could ever have persuaded us to jump—and there we stood until we imagined—or did it?—it did it did it did, the first one began to sting
and
We
leapt!
and came up gasping shock and squealing laughter.
Afterwards, exhausted, we would lie splayed out on our backs beside the big pool. Now was the time for listening to the water plunge, for watching the clouds over at the tip of Popocatepetl smouldering there across from us. Eventually, when we could bring ourselves to stir again we would peer down, on hands and knees, to the bottom of the pool and point out to each other with our noses the locations of crayfish and frogs. And in a certain light with the surface of the pool slightly wavering, I could not have distinguished her reflection from my own.
But that day we still had a mystery to solve. From the lower bench we had seen the last of the high cataracts laddering down from the snow line to vanish into a crevice a good way up the bare, dry wall that formed the forehead of Ixayac. And yet there was this stream here beside us.
The holds for hands and feet were not at all easy to make out, and the rocks, continuously wet, were slimy and treacherous. But the climb proved worth the risk. The upper bench was as wide as the first but less deep, the bare rock wall vertical, soaring hundreds of varas above us.
But what we were ecstatic to discover was a single jet of water, waist high, bursting from the dry stone in a long rooster tail.
“Let’s stand in there!” Amanda cried, dragging me in. We tried to hold out against the force of water but anywhere near the opening was impossible. The horizontal surge had scalloped out a shallow teardrop from the smooth bedrock. There in the pool where the jet fell to our shins we could just hold on, clutching desperately at each other’s arms for fear of being swept down to the lower bench. The water—a liquid snow—sent an ache like a deep bruise through our knees and shins. When we could take no more we staggered out to come and sit sideways at the ledge, stretching our legs out on warm stone worn smooth as a hide.
I came to see that the skin cream of our region did have magical properties, in the delicate spell of stopped time. For the next year we ran past the trout pool to Ixayac, and never told a soul. Perhaps we kept the secret for Xochitl, who could not go up and had told only us. It was a time of searching—it was only a game—for rituals and visions and secret ceremonies.
I have been instructed to meditate upon all the crimes of my life, to overlook none, no matter how seemingly small, and truly who can tell which sins are great, which insignificant? I return to this time and find they are not few.
Yet there is so much here I find difficult to regret. It was a year of pleasures so intense I ached with them, and do still some nights. We woke so fresh each dawn, ready to use our hearts again, ready to make them run. In this manner the circuit of our childhood quietly crossed its equinox, and into a season of lengthening shadows, where, if anything, the air was brighter, clearer. I feel that year still as a memory in my legs, my knees, my thighs, for we ran everywhere—we ran in delight, we ran to joy, and it turned and waited. For one more year. Childhood, the purest part of it, was drawing to a close.
For the Greek’s, whose language I have still not learned, the word for this particular excellence I think is not aret? but át?, which some call ‘ruin.’ Once, though, it meant divine infatuation. Sophocles must have preferred this sense, for it was he who said mortal life can have no true greatness or excellence without the special infatuation that is átē.13
But while we were at Ixayac, the heart of the earth beat only for us, and time seemed to stop.
†‘armspans’—units of measure close to the Spanish braza or fathom
†tongue-twisters
JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ
B. Limosneros, trans.
A los triunfos de Egipto
con dulces ecos
concurren festivos
la Tierra y el Cielo,
pues están obligados
ambos a hacerlo;
y acuden alegres
a tanto festejo,
el golpe del agua
y el silbo del viento,
el son de las hojas
y el ruido del eco.
Coplas
Ya fuese vanidad, ya Providencia,
el Filadelfo invicto, Tolomeo,
tradujo por Setenta y Dos varones
la Ley Sagrada en el idioma Griego.
Quiso Dios que debiese a su cuidado
la pureza del Viejo Testamento
la Iglesia, y que enmendase por sus libros
lo que en su original vició el Hebreo.
Mas ¿por qué (¡oh Cielos!), por qué a un Rey Pagano
concedió Dios tan alto privilegio,
como hacerlo custodio soberano
de la profundidad de sus secretos?
….
The triumphs of Egypt
in dulcet strains
the Earth and Heavens
in concert hymn,
since neither can
refrain;
while upon such festivity
joyously attend
the purling of streams
and whistle of the wind,
the rustle of leaves
and the echo’s lament.
Coplas
Be it vanity or Providence,
the indomitable Ptolemy Philadelphus14
assigned seventy-two sages to the translation
of the Holy Scriptures into Greek.
God so ordained that to his care
our Church should owe the Old Testament’s purity,
and that by his hand be corrected
wherein the Hebrew original erred.
But why (O Heaven!), why to a Pagan King
did God grant so exalted a privilege
as to make him sovereign Guardian
of His deepest mysteries?
….
THE GREAT GEOMETER
After the decline of Athens and before the rise of Constantinople there was the city Alexander founded on the ruins of ancient Egypt, at the mouth of the Nile. In Alexandria’s harbour stood the island of Pharos, its lighthouse a wonder to all the ancient world. Fifty fathoms high, and in its curved mirror the whole world stood reflected, as in the panoptic eye of God. A promontory shaped like an hourglass lay between Pharos and Alexandria, and behind the city spread a lake, Mareotis.
City of the suicides Cleopatra and Marc Antony, site of Alexander’s tomb, built by his viceroys the Ptolemies. From Ethiopia and Upper Egypt, Persia and Palestine, Rome and Athens the settlers came. The Ptolemies constructed a museum and gave orders that every ship entering port surrender its books so that copies could be made, and so to collect a knowledge tha
t came and went on the winds. Books from everywhere—not just in Greek but in Persian, Hebrew, the holy languages of the Indies, and in the hieroglyphics.
At the firepit I exclaimed over the great works inspired by the liberal patronage of the Ptolemies. Troubled by my first doubts as to the vastness of our holdings, I asked Abuelo how was it he’d never brought out books on Alexandria before. And might not the generous collections of Mexico City have a similarly inspirational effect here? Which was my way of asking when he had last been to Mexico for new books.
Since, he ventured in reply, Alexandria was my current area of scholarly interest—with, evidently, a sub-specialization in the romances of Cleopatra—did I perhaps recall reading that the Serapeum had housed also the Nile-gauge, sacred controller of floods? Geometry too was a gauge. The Alexandrians became great geometers precisely because the flooding forced them to revise their land surveys so often.
“You see, they practised.” He let the word hang a moment in the air. “So, señorita, perhaps we might soon be seeing a revival of your own studies in geometry….”
On Grandfather’ book tray the next afternoon was just such a work. All of them, in fact, had to do with geometry, as if he’d simply lifted an entire section onto the tray. The topmost volume was the most appetizing, with quite beautiful engravings. It was in Latin, which he of course read and I still could not without guessing at every second word. Finding me still there frowning over the figures at suppertime, Abuelo said he was happy to see me working at my mathematics again. He said this gently not reproachfully at all. I studied his face closely for the irony I expected there and found none. What he had chided me for on one day he seemed to have forgotten the next. That is what came to my attention at the time. But how painful to wonder if he had been hoping I would ask his help. I’d been neglecting so much more than mathematics and Latin. This would come to me in time.
Alexandria’s was a revival that would have made even Alexander’s strict tutor proud. There was Euclid, and Heron, master of the triangle, who invented a water wheel driven by steam alone. Apollonius of Perga—the Great Geometer they called him. Even Archimedes had come to Alexandria as a boy, had absorbed its passions as he walked beside the Nile and visited the lighthouse at Pharos. For did he not invent a screw for raising and lowering water levels, did he not install a great curved mirror in the lighthouse of Syracuse to set fire to the Roman fleet, did he not die trying to keep a Centurion from carrying off the very diagrams now before me? Well, if he died to preserve them, surely it would not kill me to study them carefully, even in Latin and Greek. For this was precisely what the natural philosophers of our century were doing. Ours was a revival of the Alexandrian revival, a rebirth raised to the second power. Galileo, of course, but others too in Italy and France, divining and reformulating the forgotten geometric techniques of the ancients, as laid out in the Conics and the legendary Plane Loci, a lost work that had raised endless speculations for the past thousand years. I worked with great speed. If I was to be of any help there was no time to lose.
The Nile may have made the Alexandrians great geometers, but it was into the conic sections that their greatest passion was channelled. The cone in itself was intriguing enough: in outline a triangle, in surface curved like a sphere. But where transected by a plane, precisely there at its edge, like a broadsword’s swipe through a gorgon’s neck, the joining spawns the most marvellous hybrid brood: parables made of mind and number, planes and solids both, the straight and the curved, intersecting there at order’s edge in the cut that does not stop, time itself turned to stone…. At last, there it was. For through the conic sections and with Alexandria’s help I had finally seen it: Geometry as the swordhand of Perseus raising the Gorgon’s head aloft.
As I read and worked, the sum of books in the library of Alexandria was mounting towards seven hundred thousand. A staggering number, and more flowing in every day. There came to me late, well into the night, an image of the Nile itself as that river of knowledge, and the beginnings of a verse.
Soothe, sinuous Nile,
your liquid swells …
I saw knowledge in a river, libraries in the sea—one blue sea as the library of the Nile, and all the rivers of the world that verse there, collected, catalogued, held. I saw a city in an hourglass, the eye of God in a lighthouse … and it came to me that the bright geometric figures, these and the arcane equations that represented them, were themselves so like hieroglyphs. For if hieroglyphs were symbols drawn from nature, might not Nature herself be distilled in formulas just such as these?
Long after I put out the lamp, behind my closed lids danced traces of light—triangles and parallelograms, spheres and cones, shapes called tetrahedron, dodecahedron … secret formulae, r=a?, A=?r2 …
Early in our explorations at Ixayac we had been forced to concede that the axolotls were gone from the pool or we would have seen one, no matter how cunning its camouflage. But we had found enchantments enough as the days and months passed. In the shallows scuttled crayfish, and tiny snails. Little frogs that heaved and leaned at each croak as if crooning to a duet partner. And as in a gathering of the very highest aerial society, we decided, red-trimmed butterflies danced minuets devised by dryads, while blue dragonflies shuffled and snapped and skimmed over the water. One day we carried two small turtles up from the river to keep them all company. The turtles grew as the snails disappeared, but there were a few tadpoles left that we decided were very much like salamanders.
There was a kind of solemnity in our nakedness now as we bathed or swam or lay on the dark slate by the waterfall to dry off. Amanda no longer lay splayed to the sun but kept her ankles joined and her arms crossed over the slight swelling of her breasts.
“Have mine changed?” I’d asked anxiously a few days before. I didn’t think so at all, whereas her nipples stuck up like raw little chessmen.
“They have, I think,” she not-quite insisted. “A little….”
Lunch was almost always on the upper bench, next to the teardrop pool. It was cooler with the mist and more comfortable to sit, where the stone was worn smooth. And when we did grow too warm we made dashes through the icy jet of water bursting from the dry rock face. The game had been Amanda’s invention, as the game with the honey cream had been mine. But today she didn’t want to play. She said she wasn’t feeling well, though she’d been eating like a goat. Yesterday she’d had a nose bleed that wouldn’t stop for half an hour. Still, we did not lack for things to do—the falcons from last year were back. We had been watching them for hours each day. Their nest was in a niche above the upper bench, three or four times our height up the face. Soon there came a batch of chicks. We could hear them—even over the crash of water the clamour was riotous whenever one of the parents would swoop back with lunch. A dove, a grouse, a crow, occasionally a water bird. Once, we thought, a kingfisher. What a sight it would have been to see a falcon take a kingfisher as it swiftly skimmed the river.
At first one of the parents would perch at the lip of the rock niche and tear its catch apart for the other, which brooded almost constantly over the nest. We were sure this must be the female, even if falcons didn’t seem much like chickens. From the rock she would gather with a precise delicacy gobbets of rent flesh or guts and feed them down into the nest. After a few weeks we could see the chicks, their beaks at least, reach up to take the meat. We thought there were three, and once they were bigger we could see we’d been right. How curious to discover they were entirely white, as though tarred and dipped in fluffy clumps of cotton. Which lent them the most tender, confused expression. They looked like lambs—we had to laugh. But what savage lambs these must grow to be.
By now both adults were constantly bringing these lambs their meat. More than once over the course of our own lunch we’d see each of the parents swing by the niche with a crumpled bird and simply drop it whole into the nest, then fly off again. Within a few more weeks the young presented a reasonable likeness of their parents. Their faces grew fierc
e and barred, and but for some cottony tufts on their heads, they were real falcons. They took turns now leaping up to the lip of the niche and spreading their wings in great shows of falcon daring and vainglory…
Amanda and I were almost eleven. María was sixteen, Josefa fourteen. Isabel was spending more time with them now, evenings of sewing and embroidery. Twice a week she took them into town for la manzana, with their personal military escort riding along beside them on his dappled gelding. As for this guest of ours, Diego Ruíz had been reaching the hacienda a little earlier each time, often now before Isabel was back from the fields. The lance-captain would let his dog run out with him from the garrison for exercise, a heavy-headed mastiff. If we happened to come in not through the kitchen but through the main portal, the dog’s yellow eyes did not stray from us, though the thing never stirred from its master’s side unless released.
One evening I went the short way into town with the others. It was the day before Isabel was to take my sisters on a journey to Chalco. Delighted to be getting the hacienda all to ourselves, I agreed to go in and see this legendary manzana. But only if Amanda could come. Even Abuelo decided to join us.
Our mother drove, with my sisters next to her, foundering in their farthingales. Amanda and I rode in the cart-bed on a heap of fresh straw and the blankets we would need for the chilly ride home. She wore a white huipil, and a green sash and skirt, its hem delicately embroidered, and a heavy cotton rebozo. She looked beautiful, a shy queen riding in the bed of our rugged cart. Diego rode his pied grey horse just at Isabel’s left shoulder; Grandfather rode behind to keep us company, though such was our rising excitement (or mine) he could hardly get a word in.
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