There was a mild earthquake just before dawn. I found the kitchen door open and Amanda already outside, her black hair plaited with blue ribbons. She wore her best huipil. In the dim light her knees and shins were dark against the whiteness of her cotton skirt. She had cleaned and oiled the leather of her huaraches. I glanced down at my own, the sandal straps dusty and spattered.
“Where have you been?” Now she was eager to go—would I ever truly know her? Maybe she had understood after all what I’d been trying to tell her, or maybe Xochitl had said it would be all right. “It’s late already.”
It was late, but I had been up for an hour packing my satchel with magnets, pyrite, flint, a fire-bow just in case, the Metamorphoses, the Bible, a block of oily black chocolate, a knife to cut it with, our lunch, then, on top, cornflowers, cempasuches and agave spikes.
We spoke very little, having decided to run almost all the way up to give ourselves more time. She took the lead easily. I was carrying the heavier satchel but I didn’t mind at all and didn’t once ask her help. Though I was not quite out of breath, my knees felt weak as we reached the lower bench. We made our way up the stream then clambered up to the temazcal.
“Let’s go see the falcons first,” Amanda said.
We usually went there last but I did want the day to be different. Still, I wouldn’t leave until we had started the fire so that the coals would be ready when we came down. I laid fresh pine boughs to one side as a covering for the roof. Then I refilled the clay jar we used to splash water over the stones and drink from. We’d just reached the upper bench when the falcons launched themselves out into the valley in single file, up and up, far above a long vee of ducks arrowing towards the lake in the distance below them. Today was to be a hunting lesson.
I was anxious to come down and get started. I laid the bundle of cempasuche flowers at the threshold of the temazcal, so as to have to step over them going in and coming out. But Amanda wanted to swim first, though that too we usually did afterwards. I saw how the cloth was attached as she undressed. It was of the same dark, tightly woven cotton we used for rebozos, folded half a dozen times and tied front and back to a sash around her waist. She undid the sash. She looked at me anxiously, as though I might laugh or even be repelled. But as she stood, otherwise naked, half turned from me—her breasts like little barrels, small spigots at the tips—my breath caught in my throat.
“You look like a warrior, now, NibbleTooth.”
At that her head dipped, a little nod of modesty, as in surprise, as if to check: Was it true …? And I remembered how just last year we used to stand on the slate rock above the pool and stick our bellies out like the women with child who had once come here to await their time. Now she could have a child. For a moment we were both serious, a little shy. But she grew more animated as we smeared ourselves with the honey-avocado cream. Almost immediately the wasps began to circle and her quickness made a spectacular game of it as she dodged and whirled, squealing madly, away from them. I had already leapt into the pool.
“Amanda, hurry!”
She faltered then and had to launch herself in a long running leap into the pool to keep from being badly stung. As we stood in the sun to dry off, I noticed our two turtles sunning themselves too, as they often did, on a small rock next to the waterfall.
“Do you do your dance first or should I do my poem?”
Her eyes wavered and I had the distinct impression she’d forgotten about the dance she was to prepare.
“Your poem.”
It still wasn’t finished but I gave what I had so far, the refrain, two verses. When she said nothing, I asked her to teach me her dance. She improvised the most dispirited little shuffle, hardly better than I could have come up with myself, and I knew I was right. She had forgotten all about it.
We’d put this off long enough.
“The temazcal,” I said, and stalked off ahead of her. Brusquely I laid the pine boughs overtop, grabbed my satchel, stepped over the flowers at the threshold and squatted in the heat. A full minute later she ducked in after me. She really didn’t seem to care about this at all. Well, I did care, and I knew how we had to do this, and with great seriousness. The heat was intense. Taking the knife from the satchel I reached up and pried little beads of dried sap from the branches, then threw them into the fire for incense. From beyond the walls the little waterfall plashed and a smoky light fell through the doorway. Once I had tipped all the water from the clay jar onto the stones, the air was too hot to breathe through our noses. As we squatted there, heads bowed, our breaths came in little gasps through our lips. Runnels of sweat puddled under us. Through the pine smoke and steam and the sweat blinking into my eyes it was hard to say how much blood was under her but it didn’t seem like much.
“Listen carefully. What we do next is daub ourselves in blood. You do me, I do you. We draw signs. On me: sun, hourglass, quarter moon, pyramid. On you: lighthouse, quarter moon, jaguar, cotton flower. All right?” She nodded without looking up. “Then, when we’re ready to come out, we each dip a finger into the mud and place it in our mouth.” There was a formula I had heard somewhere that came to me now. Dare Terram Deo. Render the earth unto god. “That’s it, we say this first, then we put our fingers with the mud into our mouths.” This was the Heart of the Earth after all.
“Repeat it.”
“Dare Terram Deo.”
That was better. She’d said it just right. Once outside, we would stand by the pool while I read from Proverbs. After that we’d dry off on the slate rock and weave crowns of cornflowers and agave. We’d put them on and it would be like rising through a plane of loveliness, ornaments of grace upon our heads. Then, solemnly, we’d take each other by the hand and plunge into the pool—head first, for once. “Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Then we eat the chocolate. Yollotl, eztli, right?” Heart and blood.
“Yes,” she said. “Heart and blood.”
And last of all, when we were ready to go down we’d leave the lunch we’d brought as an offering. Was she ready?
A stillness settled around us.
She was facing the door. I edged next to her, facing the back of the hut, and turned slightly towards her, my right shoulder to hers. The coals glowed red in the shadows. I dipped my finger into the puddle under her. She started nervously when I touched her back with my fingertip. It left only a dirty little track, with hardly any blood at all. I dipped again and scooped but with all four fingers now. Again, sweat, a little mud, the faintest hint of blood.
“Is that all?” I said.
“There was more yesterday.”
“But this is the most important part.” Blood was for the mixing of the secret salts and balms, blood was the essential agent, blood was for binding the spirits and resins. Blood. Wasn’t that obvious?
“I—I’m sorry.”
It must have been the way we were squatting, facing past each other, my shoulder to her side, but I had the idea it might be like milking a cow. You didn’t just wait for the milk to fall, after all. So I put my fingers there. She flinched, then held still and quiet. There wasn’t anything really to squeeze but I did a kind of kneading with my fingers, as we did with the cornmeal, or when squeezing water through the muslin for the curd. I raised my fingers to my face to see better. Just plain dirt on the knuckles, and on the tips was nothing like paint at all, only the thinnest smears of rust. I shook my head, disgusted, furious.
“What should we do?” she asked, her eyes wide.
“We need blood.”
I picked up the knife where it lay next to the green rabbit satchel.
Slowly, gravely, Amanda offered her arm.
I looked into her eyes.
“Not you,” I said, mollified. “We need something to collect it in.” And then I remembered. “Wait here, I’ll be back.”
The turtles were still there sunning themselves on the far side of the pool. I snatched one up and sprinted back to the temazcal, ducking in out of breath and
suddenly dizzy. For a moment I kneeled, bent double, my elbows in the mud. When the dizzy spell passed I looked up at Amanda still huddling where I’d left her. I settled back on my heels, the knife still in my left hand, the turtle waggling his legs in the other.
“Why do you want to hurt it?”
“I don’t, but we need to now.”
“But why do we need to?”
“If you’d warned me there’d be so little blood we could have brought a jar of it—collected some from you yesterday, if there was as much as you said.”
“But why our turtle?”
Why was she making such a fuss? We could get another. There were dozens down by the river. How many chickens had I seen her plucking with Xochitl? How many lambs had we seen Isabel slice through the throats of? And we had eaten them. This was just for blood. “Where else are we going to get blood and a shell?”
“Why do you want to use his shell?”
“Are you so stupid or just pretending? Like a dish, like a mortar for alchemical elements, like a palette for paints. Now do you see?”
She stood suddenly, knocking the boughs away as she straightened up. The sudden light was bright. Her face was a hard mask with thin tracks through the grit beneath her eyes.
I squatted there, exasperated and a little embarrassed now.
“Aren’t we just like them?” she said.
“The turtles?”
“The priests.”
“What priests?”
“From the desert.”
“What des—”
What desert.
She was asking me a question.
To this simple question, there must be an answer.
I could say they were not priests but monks. After all, I was very learned. All the correct words came to mind. Desert monks. Hermit, eremite, anchorite. How should I answer?
I set the knife down, carefully. And the turtle.
“We’re not like them.”
It bumped over my toes on its way out of the hut and began working its way through the tangle of cempasuche stalks strewn across the threshold. “We’re not, NibbleTooth. You’re not.”
She said nothing.
“Do you think I am? After everything I’ve told you? I wanted to do this for us. Something just for us and Ixayac. Weren’t we doing this together?” Her eyes skimmed mountains we had looked at hundreds of times. “You’re the one who talks about real rituals. I wanted this to be real for you. As real as Xochita’s.”
She was at least looking at me now.
“You have your mother, Amanda.”
“Well you have your grandfather.”
Abuelito … Yes, I had my grandfather. I remembered his face the day of the storm as he handed me Hesiod, the day he sat quietly waiting for me to ask for help with my geometry. And it felt then as if I hadn’t seen him, truly talked to him in years.
“Why don’t you go down to Xochitl now.”
I wasn’t angry. I felt the words coming from a long way away, from a desolate place. All my confusion and resentment and hurt and envy were a heaviness pulling, sagging down in me, at my guts and lungs and heart.
“Go on. I’ll stay for a while. No. I want to. Be by myself, for a little while. Don’t worry. Two palms,” I said, and smiled weakly. It felt as if my lips were sliding off my face. And the truth was, she looked as I felt. Stricken. My twin. Her face pale as my white heart.
I slipped my shift back over my head while she dressed, then went with her to the edge of the bench and the holds. We stood a minute looking out over the city on the lake.
As I watched from above she started silently down, then hesitated at the bottom. She looked up. “Ixpetz. I’m so sorry.” She said it too quietly to hear, but I could tell from her lips, from her chin, its edges crumpled like a leaf.
When I was sure she’d really gone I slipped the satchel strap over my shoulder and made my way to the upper bench. My limbs were so weak with trembling I was afraid I might slip. I sat for a while in the mist beside the water jet. I spread the contents of my satchel out. The cornflowers and agave strips for crowns. The Metamorphoses, green ribbons sprouting out of Proverbs.
I watched the falcons returning after another hunt. This marvel of falcon flight, such slender, trembling wings were these, to marshal the wildest legions of the air, to plummet as each wing folds itself as neatly as a letter. I listened to their voices, for what they might tell, but they had nothing to say that I could ever decipher. Through what mysteries had Egypt made the falcon the god of silence? Who was this child of Isis, and what mysteries did its silence hold, this speaker of such wild speech? Did the truth dwell in the pauses between its cries, as with the trout in the pool? Or between these echoes reverberating now—like blows from a shield—off rock and water. And what was the exultation in that throat and those wings but the talent of flight that resolves itself like a target in the archer’s eye?
I wanted to run, to call after Amanda, but to say what?—that they cry after the knowledge of it, with the sudden wild joy of it, this talent in their wings. To know at last what those great bows are shaped for. In vain the nets are spread for them, before their sight, in those clear eyes. To have found the talent that will not betray them, never to surrender it again, and know to what high places they are bound.
I had wanted visions, I had wanted us to pant on jimsonweed like water dogs, like walking fish—for us to lie gasping on the bank, and wake as tigers—I had wanted to see into everything, all the mysteries and silences. But now something had slid, something had smashed. We hadn’t stopped the Nile together, but we had stopped the running. I believe I already sensed this but refused to see the import of what I’d done. I spent the next month, then the next years explaining it away, why the year of running had stopped. And each time I did this, it felt a little worse. I had scratched the jade.
LIBRARY
All the way down from Ixayac, I thought of Abuelo, how badly I needed to hear his voice, to feel his big knobbly hand on my shoulder, his forehead against mine. Just to talk, as we used to, and to ask him to help me to understand friendship, and how and if and why it must end; to help me know my talent and my destiny, for I had come to know that they were not separate, these riddles and my life. While my life was rich and I had discovered a lot, if only I knew more, looked harder, opened my eyes still wider, I might yet see the wonder of secret meanings woven into everything, every word and gesture. This was Pandora, this was the universal gift.
I came in through the main portal. At the end of the passageway into the courtyard my steps faltered, stopped. The black mastiff crouched before the library door. His baleful yellow eyes fastened onto mine as I stepped over him. I could feel his breath on my ankles as I stopped short of the doorway and leaned in to call to Abuelo. Seeing the dog should have served as warning. I was caught completely off guard.
Standing behind Grandfather’s chair and stooped indulgently to read what Abuelo was writing at his desk was lance-captain Diego Ruiz Lozano. Casually he turned—both of them turned—at my call. His face was utterly bare of the slightest guilt or gloating. Abuelo’s face, though, fell, as he read the hurt and shock in mine.
Who was this popinjay in uniform, that he should stand in that library as if born to it, when I had only stopped at its threshold like a church beggar. I had read half the books in there. Abuelo opened his mouth to speak. Stepping back I turned, trod upon the mastiff’s paw—a yelp, a bark of fury, Diego roaring at the dog—Abuelo calling Angel, wait—
My satchel thudded to the ground. I ran through the courtyard, past the well, the firepit, to my room, stopped at the door—turned back and ran furiously up the watchtower steps. And then I had nowhere left to run. I was trapped. Trapped by these mountains, this tower, trapped by this place. I turned away. My eyes went past the threads of smoke rising over the red roofs of the town, past the vegetable plots to the west—dust hanging like a shower of gold in the sun—past the orchards to the north—and finding peace in none of it. I collapse
d sobbing fury in the shadow of the wall.
A few minutes or an hour passed, and hearing him labouring wheezily up the steps I dried my cheeks on my sleeve. Quietly he set the green rabbit satchel next to me on the yoke of the cannon carriage and leaned awkwardly between one wheel and the barrel to catch his breath.
“Angelina, I am sorry about this,” he began. “A painful moment. For both of us….” He seemed at a loss, and to see him struggle to apologize, I felt worse than ever. Because I should be the one.
“Abuelo, no—how could I blame you for wanting company?—but Diego.” He held up a hand to stop me. Maybe he would have said, then, exactly why the moment was particularly painful for him: for what Diego had been watching him sign was a promissory note for a hundred pesos. But I didn’t let Abuelo finish. It was all tumbling out of me now in a rush. Not directly about Ixayac but about turtles and trout, about the falcons and how it felt to watch and hear them call. At first he was mystified, then stood, his hands hanging down helplessly, as I mumbled and rambled on about Amanda and friendship, about my selfishness and all my fury at the riddles I could never quite solve.
Did he see? But no, how could anybody understand any of it. Or me. Or my fears that I might do something truly terrible one day. His frown uncreased at this and he opened wide his arms. He patted my back as I cried against his belly for a while, blotching his shirt and the lacings of his doublet. Even then I did not think of what had happened at Ixayac as anything more than a horrible failure.
“How odd,” Abuelo said, “that you should be speaking to me of falcons.” He pulled me up to sit on the warm cannon barrel next to him.
“Did you know that in Andalusía hunting hawks were a kind of universal madness when I was your age? It was … either 1599 or 1600 … y esas malditas escopetas† had not yet ruined the hunting. In the streets of the towns anyone of substance had a hawk on his wrist—or hers. The Moors were the greatest masters, in hawking as in so many matters. Yes exactly, Angelina, in mathematics, too. Once on the banks of the Guadalquivir I held a gyrfalcon on my wrist. Y te lo juro, Angel, the power in that bird’s talons could have crushed my arm. It came into my mind then that I had only to remove its leather hood to have it carry me—as if unfurling a sail—off across the Gulf, right over Cadiz, and home to Tangiers. For this was a falcon of Africa. What a moment that was. Of course a gyrfalcon was not for children, or even commoners. In many countries it was then an offence for anyone less than a king to own one. And if a child might possess nothing more than a kestrel, what bird, do you think, was exclusive to an emperor?
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