Hunger's Brides

by W. Paul Anderson

  We had climbed to the Heart of the Earth, we had walked in halls of jade. If I had not done something terrible at Ixayac, even had I not hurt her then, I could not deny I was hurting her now. What difference did it make whether I had scratched the jade or had done something that only felt like that? She is not safe with me, she is not safe if I go. What will my perfect gesture be?

  And then I knew. I could not solve it. I knew I would fail, I knew I would leave.

  During the next two days I could hardly bear to be near her. Each time came the shock of a horrified recognition: this is your life, I thought, over and over. This will be your life. There is a prize, there is a price. Solve the riddle, to save and keep her. I saw Amanda’s face each day more drawn and gaunt.

  The prize is to learn my destiny and join the great revival in Europe, a new golden age. The price is to end the race of gold, and stop the running to Ixayac.

  The price is an age of iron when children are born already old.

  The price was Amanda.

  JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ

  B. Limosneros, trans.

  Pure waters of the Nile

  recede, recede

  and deny

  thy tribute to the Sea,

  for such bountiful

  cargo she can only envy.

  Cease, cease, roll on not one more mile,

  For no greater joy awaits thee

  than here … nigh.

  Recede, recede …

  Soothe, sinuous, Nile,

  thy liquid swells;

  hold, hold fast,

  to gaze in rapture

  on what thy beauty brings to us,

  from earth, from Heaven’s Rose and Star,

  whose lifeblood thou art …

  AGE OF IRON

  Four years later, after my ride through the Sunday streets with Magda and María, I wanted to go home. The price had been too high, though I would not quite see how high until I had made the journey. Uncle Juan had offered to send me by carriage, a different carriage, but understood when I declined. With a porter close behind us with my little lío,† he walked me himself all the way from the house. The bundle contained only a change of travelling clothes, but slung over my shoulder I carried for luck the green rabbit satchel Amanda had made for me, and in it some keepsakes. As we approached the canal there was just room to go two abreast alongside the file of wagons advancing still more slowly than we were.

  “You were wise to want to walk, Juanita.”

  The wharf on the canal was a pandemonium. Landing here four years earlier from Panoayan, I’d thought it like an anthill. The anthill had been kicked over now. With la Virgen de Guadalupe’s festival in just two days’ time, the waterway was as choked with canoes as the street and landing were with heavy carts. Jostling to land, the dugouts were backed all the way down the canal like a string of stewards serving at a cardinal’s table. In one canoe, bunches of bananas each as big as a man. In the next, their feathers dusty from the trip, a half-dozen black guajalotes squabbling like curates with scarlet wattles and smoke-blue heads. Every third canoe all but overflowed with fresh-cut flowers and—out of season in our valley—roses rushed in relays of express post horses up from the south. I’d have no trouble finding passage to the eastern shore. An unbroken file of empty dugouts was heading there.

  Something stirred in the air like a scent, faintly exhilarating. What I had taken for shouts of confusion I now heard as a kind of workmanly raillery. Near me a tall African took an armload of flowers from a snowy-haired Indian, who had the wildly bowed legs of some ancient cavalryman. I caught a snatch of something in a decent Nahuatl. The African was asking him if he hadn’t maybe kept a few for a sweetheart. The old man laughed outright, then—glancing toward us—stopped. It occurred to me that all these men might in fact work for Uncle Juan.

  “The northern canal, Juana, will be even worse, and the basilica itself—olvídalo. Ten times as many as at the poetry tourney on Saturday.”

  “A hundred thousand people?”

  “You should go. I would take you,” he said, still taking in the scene. “What your aunt and Magda did … it would never happen again.”

  “I have to go back, Uncle.”

  He glanced down at me. “I just wanted you to hear it.”

  “I know…. Thank you.”

  He went to find a boatman to take me. As he walked down I noticed a pink bald patch the size of my palm on the crown of his head. He found a boat in less than a minute. I met him halfway down. It was difficult to hear, to talk. To say good-bye to him.

  “Say hello to your mother. Tell her it’s been too long.”

  Afraid I might cry I said nothing in answer. The boatman shoved off with a paddle blade. Uncle Juan called out. “If you do decide on just a short visit, consider being back for the audience with the Viceroy. Royalty can be a bit particular about their invitations….” He began this with a shrug, but hearing him raise his voice awkwardly to bridge the distance gave me an inkling of what was at stake for him. First prize. Our first prize. I had forgotten it entirely. Before I could make an answer we were too far off with so much noise on the dock. I met his eyes, held them and nodded. He nodded back. The boatman manoeuvred us into a throng of dugouts bumping hollowly and angling towards open water.

  With the mountains dead ahead I did have a little cry—the surfeit of an emotion I couldn’t identify quite. Sorrow, regret … and something like relief. Foot traffic on the eastern causeway went at a crawl. Halfway along, a herd of cattle was broken into smaller clusters by pilgrims struggling to get past. Seven smaller herds, perhaps fifty cows in each, with five or six horsemen strung among them like sea serpents rearing above a flood. After a while I reached into my lío for a little lunch of dried figs tied up in a handkerchief. When I turned back to offer the boatman some, he smiled and shook his head. Sweat stood out on his brow; he was paddling smoothly but hard. Each stroke sent little whirlpools spinning away behind us.

  I slept now, warmed by the sun, no screaming rising from the streets, no processions, no candles. No carriages, no forges, no hell. And dreamed of Ixayac.

  The wharf behind us had been the picture of my own confusion, and yet I had left it strangely heartened. The feeling, or the word for it, had been not quite relief but reprieve. So much like the day of my arrival when Aunt María had met me at the landing, it was as if I were simply turning back and none of the intervening four years had happened. The dirty village on the lakeshore did not lack for mule teams. It took an extra hour to find an honest-looking young driver with a team of oxen.

  On the morning of the second day, we entered the highest valley. Soon I knew that we could not be more than an hour away. In no time we had turned off the main road onto the track running up to the hacienda. I clutched tight in my lap to the satchel of keepsakes I had brought against the accusation that I had not written in all this time. How hollowly it rang in my mind to say that I had not looked back, or tried not to, because I was afraid I could not otherwise find the courage to stay away. I had not wanted to look back but had brought the things I had loved with me, because I could not bring the people. And I had never blamed Amanda for not coming out to say good-bye to me.

  I knew that things could not be as they had once been but I understood now that Xochitl had been right, that the capital was no place for a daughter of hers. I knew something now about servants and Indians, and about all she and Amanda had kept from me and how much they had given by withholding it. And I wanted to tell her that I saw at last the enormous difference between having a fate and pursuing a destiny, and that if there was ever a problem for us to have tried hard to solve, it was not how I might find mine but how she might escape hers. We were fifteen now. Things could not be the same, but maybe in a few years, when we were older, we might find our own way in the world, together.

  But above all that day, there was something I needed to say to Amanda about what had happened at Ixayac. I saw how much I had wronged her. And since then I had understood
even something of why—though I must not let this sound like an excuse. It had taken years, but I had resolved the one mystery that I had allowed to drive us apart. How these things had consumed and bewildered me. That the Alexandrian renaissance died that day in the body of its most illustrious expositor, a rebirth ripped from the womb in a church called Caesarion…. That the heavy vessels used by the monks of the Natron lakes were certainly Canopic jars filled with embalming fluid, to make the dead last a thousand years. That the pottery shards and oyster shells the desert monks had used to scrape the flesh from Hypatia’s bones would surely have formed the conic sections called parabola. That the commentaries on the Conics of Apollonius, the highest glory of the Alexandrian revival, were written by none other than Hypatia and her father.

  A mystery called Cinaron, a riddle call Caesarion, a puzzle of broken pottery. But out of so many riddles, in all the years of my exile, there was one whose edges had never lost their sharpness. And this one I had solved. Ostrakis aneilon. Oyster shells … and also the roofing tiles on whose fragments the name of the one to be banished was inscribed. Hypatia had been ostracized, for ten centuries. But for this solution there was to be no prize.

  Oyster shells, pottery tiles, parabola…. One other conic section is the turtle shell.

  In the whiteness of my hunger I had sacked the Sarapeum, destroyed the Serapiana, violated all that was chaste in a time that has gone. Hypatia’s role had not been mine to play at all. This part was for another. The best part of myself.

  As the ox cart came to a stop behind the house, it was this I was remembering, and Ixayac. I had seen something of the world, and knew now that heresy was not just about books; neither were treason and betrayal only things of distant countries and pasts. And I had more yet to learn about the Inquisition, and from Magda. Even now I wonder what I might have found to say. I was not to get the chance, for not even Hypatia’s banishment was truly mine to play. But I think I had already sensed this. A campesino I did not recognize was making his way toward us. I pointed out to the driver the water troughs for the oxen and promised to bring him water to drink from the house. My hand trembling a little, I gave him an extra centavo for the journey. I called to the farmhand to put ‘good’ corn into the feedbags. Good corn. I must have sounded even more foolish to him than I did to myself. He plainly had no idea who I was. Standing here talking nonsense—trembling hands—was this how I was to face Amanda?

  I forced myself to think instead of Xochitl. How I had missed her. I rapped shyly, then a little louder. The kitchen door had never been locked. A young Indian woman opened now. She stood before me in the doorway, nursing an infant under her rebozo. “¿Sí, señorita? A sus órdenes,” she added in a good Castilian. Perhaps seeing my distress, she stepped back and beckoned me in.“Pásele.”

  A pale, curly-haired boy of four or five was playing with wooden soldiers on the kitchen floor. Struggling for calm I went into the pantry. A single hammock was slung in the corner, where a cross-draft between the windows made sleeping more comfortable. I felt my blood turn to rust—a ball of iron in the pit of my stomach. “Where is Xochitl?” I could not even have formed Amanda’s name. The young woman’s eyes widened. She clutched the infant more tightly to her.

  “Who?” she asked, and stepped between me and the boy. He reached up to where her hand fumbled to find his, this boy who was my half-brother. I rushed from the kitchen into the courtyard looking for Isabel, for anyone.

  In the middle of the courtyard, where the firepit had once been, I stopped. Like a sentry, yet somehow broken now, a man sat in the rocking chair by Isabel’s door, where he had often sat, our dinner guest waiting for her to come in from the fields. Lance-captain Diego Ruiz Lozano was much changed, much aged. The head of hair once so thick with curls lay lank. Lacklustre now the black beard, and from the upper lip hung limp tatters of black rag. A blanket covered his legs, his knees thinned as if by palsy.

  “No, Juana, they have not been here for some time…. You’ve grown.”

  To be hearing this from his lips, how I rejoiced that the years had been so unkind, that the wellsprings of his life, its roots, had proved so shallow—that four years should sap them dry.

  “How long?”

  “We never did get to say good-bye.”

  “How long, Diego?”

  “You look more like your mother than ever….”

  I said nothing. After a moment he looked away.

  “She found a place for them on the far side of the pass. She went to a lot of trouble. Isabel should never have let Amanda have so much money. She should never have let them leave with it. I warned her, I warned them….”

  They never arrived. He had sent troops everywhere looking for them—to Nepantla, to Xochitl’s old village, every village on the far slope of the volcanoes. The roads were dangerous. He blamed the fifty pesos. A ridiculous sum to give a child, to give any Indian.

  I turned away from the blue ruins of those eyes—walked unsteadily down the arcade, could not bring myself to enter the darkened library. Taking up the satchel I’d left by the kitchen door I walked into the fields, through the dry corn, out towards the river. The shady spot where we used to read lay in a strip of trees between the maguey and the corn. At the foot of a cedar, a giant among the pines, stood a small granite cross. There I sank softly to the ground, sat mindless, empty, emptiness itself.

  Then into the vessel of that abhorrent emptiness rushed such a violent swarm of faces, voices, memories …

  It had never occurred to me that she would not be here, that this life I had left was not simply waiting upon my return. For four years I had fought not to look back at these mountains and think of Amanda here, looking from Ixayac down over the city. I looked up to them now, the mist thinning … the cone of El Popo cut by a wedge of cloud, WhiteLady stretched out below him … chin, breast, knees. What was the use of straining to see the secret shapes hidden in the world if I could not see into myself?

  On a patch of grass by the water troughs, the cart had been pulled up, the oxen unhitched. They had drunk their fill and were milling away at feedbags of the good corn I had called for. The young driver had slept his siesta under the cart and was stirring now. I watched him stretch, the languor of having no cargo to load or unload.

  I spread my keepsakes out before me among the pine cones and rust-coloured needles. I had been right not to look back. It solved nothing. Worse, I’d had this truth right before me for years. Into my lap I took the Cancionero general. It fell open to the very page, so often had I read it.

  Let no one be deceived, no,

  to think what is hoped for

  shall last,

  any more than what we’ve seen go….

  In the shade of that tree, there came to me the idea that the thread of my life had been broken. Perhaps it was the sheer hazard of holding the battered copy of El cancionero general. Or something to do with pottery shards. Whatever remained of my childhood had ended during a ride in a beautiful carriage through the streets of Mexico; but though I might blame the Holy Office, it was a childhood that had no right to outlast Amanda’s, just as I felt no right to grieve its loss. And that city was no place for a child. With these few things before me I would make a new start, not by looking back but by carrying my life forward with me. The poet must never look back.

  I turned at the sound of the ox cart as it lumbered slowly past the house, felt something stirring within me to watch it leave….

  One last time in Panoayan I ran—I ran from Panoayan, as I had never run in four years in the city. I went with all my strength after the cart—a broken book in my left hand, my satchel flailing and flapping in my right. As I ran up the track between the orchards and the fields and as the rich bloom of damsons filled my mind I would have let myself see no similarities between the past and what I was doing now, no precedents or patterns at all, not even in the explorer’s compulsion to abandon the known world, to discover the new. Yes, I had quit Ixayac for a library I had barely glimp
sed, and yes I had abandoned Panoayan for a city I had only seen from afar and as if in a dream. But I had seen Mexico City now. The receptions, the poetry jousts, the prizes. I had met the Viceroy and was to have an audience and meet his blond wife. So of course I knew that world, and ran toward it. There I would make a new thread and spin out my dream of a different destiny.

  Too breathless to laugh at the young driver’s confusion, I clambered up on aching legs to the cart seat. Such a whirl of seasons lay ahead of me, such episodes, such deep tones and bright hues, like the brilliant shadows of a magic lantern cast blindingly from a lonely darkness. Behind me lay the mountains, a painted pane of glass, a child’s pyramid of ice gouting smoke and beet-juice fire.

  Ahead, three commoners, three young poets, arriving at the most brilliant palace in a new world. The audience with a vice-king, the fascinations of a vice-queen—the most exotic creature I had ever seen, a princess in a dream.

  Glass.

  Afterwards, staying up all that first night with Carlos, reliving every detail. Pouring out my heart to him, all our hurts to each other, telling him things of Nepantla and Panoayan. Discovering our shared passion for the great work in train in Europe, so far away … his growing doubts about becoming a Jesuit.

  The bastard country girl installed at the palace as the Vice-Queen’s handmaiden. The thousand wagging tongues, the slights, the propositions, the rumours, the envy. The spectacle of a public examination by forty scholars of the Royal University to determine if the prodigy of my learning were divinely inspired, as in the case of the Angelic Doctor,† or inspired by an angel of an altogether different order. Red devils on glass.

  A night of masquerade. By now I was the practised one, the initiate of masques. And in our disguises Carlos and I stopping at every pulquería in the city. The harlots, the humble broken faces crudely painted … Watching the dawn together from a rooftop after a night of gazing for the first time through a fine telescope Carlos had built himself. Hearing his vow of undying friendship when I so needed a friend; the unspoken offer of much more, when I had hurt everyone I had ever loved. It was a night that changed his life far more than mine. His whole existence had been in the city, mine in the country, and now he wanted to know everything about that countryside—because of me, for me. But this was precisely what I had left so completely behind. Figures not so easily painted on glass.