Hunger's Brides

by W. Paul Anderson

  Tonight I think of Teresa. What’s to happen to her now?

  Learned fool I tried to see these galanteos—these vile palace games—as some ancient tragic rite, as the dance of male and female satellites around a dying planetary king.33 Like the seasons, the rules for each dance change: one night the ladies draw by lot their partners for the ball; another night the men compete not for a lady’s favour but for the prize of her scorn.

  This evening’s little diversion called for the gallants to start off the ball in the arms of their second choice. Leaving us all to guess at their first.

  But first, Juanita, give us a comedy.

  She said I would have her protection. I laughed. I had not meant to wound her…. At nineteen, I was not a frightened child. I was not like them but I was not a prude. Was I not born on a farm in a pagan countryside? Have I not seen animals in the fields?—and I have seen things here. In three years at this palace I have seen too much. In a few hours, Silvio will look me full in the face and, with those glittering viper’s eyes studying my least reaction, say it was all for a bet, that he and ‘a friend’ had gone double-or-nothing on whether he could have me in the space of one single night.

  Tonight I would trade anything for the peace and silence of my girlhood in Panoayan, for the stillness of a village and a farm asleep on the dark shoulder of a volcano. I would give anything to see this bright whirlwind snuffed. I feel that mountain inside me now as smoke and solitude and stone.

  Tonight I would give up even these things to see it erupt just once in a white cone of fire.

  Ahh …

  But instead of getting to play out my small part in a great cosmic agony I watch the next act of my life reduced to low farce—for this audience finds comedy in everything. In death, in the pathetic antics of cripples and lepers, in corruption and betrayal and loss. Anything to mask this fresh wound in their chests.

  After the play she came to tell me he was waiting for me in the bowers by the Hall of Comedies. He never deigned to come to the Academy, so she led me to him like a sacrificial lamb. She even picked the place. Knowing of his interest in me, did she come to hate me because the rumours of her relations with Silvio were true, or because they never could be? Decorated soldier, veteran of a dozen duels with married men, Silvio was different, special, más varonil, más válido. Tell me….

  I am my own executioner.

  Leonor Carreto—the most beautiful creature I have ever met. How could I guess that one so beautiful could be so base? The Marquise de Mancera, for all her beauty and attainments, is bored with everything but power. And knowing this at last I feel, looking back, the malice of power in her every moment with me. With a lover’s cruelty she insisted I play, learn my part word for word. Make her words my own, as I had offered mine to her. But this, why this? Surely nothing so banal as my purity. Surely something more than a break in the tedium, the voyeurs thrill at seeing an uncommon spirit pawed over, the gambler’s at seeing a ruinous wager lost. Learned fool, calculate the probabilities. Was it to convince herself—no, convince him—that I would come to be no different than she one day, after a lifetime of petty stratagems and intrigues? Or was it instead to prove one thing? To me above all.

  The cut that wounds the mortal, the genius does not feel.

  I went like Eve towards the serpent, Ariadne after Theseus, betraying her sex, her blood, her soul … only so he could then betray her. I found him at the bottom of the garden, a darker shadow among shadows—tall and powerful through the chest. I had watched him, many times. Disdaining the fashions of the French, he wore his own hair short, shoulder length, drawn at the nape with a simple clip. The beard trimmed close, streaked grey at the cheeks. Over a grey silk doublet he wore a velvet jerkin, black, lightly corsetted, so the adoring eye might contrast the breadth of the chest with the slimness of the hip, roam from the white stockings and hose full along the lithe muscular legs—to the jaunty parting of the jerkin at the jut of the codpiece. The beautiful blue hells of his eyes, impudent … the arrogant male, even with her. Did he imagine I might simply succumb without a word?

  He stepped towards me into the moonlight, and even as I should have been thinking how deftly staged the moment was, my celebrated self-possession had already begun abandoning me. I heard myself asking how he’d found the play.

  “Interesting.”

  “Surely the representative of Milan,” I said, trying to get my footing, “has a more interesting response? Do you not find it something more than interesting that the play’s hero challenges God and defies His order, but then invites punishment for his transgressions?”

  “Only as a point of chivalry. But, yes, the old and the new. And for once, a noble man’s sinfulness is not blamed on some outside force.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought you such a staunch champion of responsibility.”

  “I believe it weak to blame new evils on old devils. Don’t you agree?”

  At last I felt myself beginning to relax. “With other causes so proximate, yes.”

  “Our hero took his fight directly to God, I respect that—and welcomed the return blow as an act of nobleza. He has committed a misconduct in his host’s house, after all. But I see this subject has begun to bore.”

  “No, no it’s just—this isn’t the face you show in there.”

  “‘This painted semblance you so admire / sets up false syllogisms of colour …’” he quoted, bowing slightly.

  “You know it?”

  “I know all your work, Juana.”

  “I never see you at my plays …”

  “Good of you to notice.”

  When had I become such a blunderer?

  “You mustn’t take it personally, child, I’m just not one for sharing. Anything. But let’s not waste your time on the trivial. As the whole world now knows, you’re no mere poetess but a formidable philosopher. Perhaps you would help me? With a little syllogism.”

  “If I can.”

  “Excellent. Let’s see … if it is true that to delight in evil creates a horror of solitude …” He glanced down at me. “Are you with me.”

  “Oh yes.”

  “And if to flee solitude is to pursue the complete and perfect joining that is love … then this would mean that to flee solitude is both to love and to delight in evil.”34

  For an instant I hesitated. And then, instead of remarking that his syllogism consisted of verb phrases rather than common nouns, instead of subjecting him to a lecture on syllogistic figures, moods and distributions, instead of reducing the ramparts of his premises to wet straw and his propositions to so much hot air, I stood like a witless quail before the gamekeeper and found myself admiring the meagre kernels he was tossing to the ground. Already I should have guessed the whole thing was rehearsed, every word, under Leonor’s direction. But I had let myself find something fatally compelling in an idea, as she knew I would. So instead of running—or standing to fight, I stuck my empty head through his little loop of string….

  “And therefore, signor, to delight in evil … is to love.”

  “Good girl, I knew you’d see.”

  “Oh I see more. I see how this makes a certain breed of man a kind of victim—at least in his own eyes—fiorced to commit evil in the pursuit of love.”

  “And don’t forget,” Silvio nodded appreciatively, “this breed of man is at the same time forced to love even in the pursuit of evil … especially in the pursuit of evil. Meanwhile—”

  “Meanwhile the Ambassador of Milan was about to say that I must then surely see how committing evil, even as it deepens his horror of solitude, also deepens his capacity for love. Therefore,” I went on, so eager to play the game, so keen to feel the braid around my throat tightening, “to love replenishes the well from which evil springs.”

  “Brava, regazza! An observation altogether worthy of the hero of our play—”

  “Yet you’ve also no doubt considered, signor, that to desire solitude sufficiently—heroically let’s say—is to make love, for t
hat man, both unnecessary and impossible, while removing all limits to his delight in evil.”

  “Delightful! Utterly delightful. You, joven,† are everything they said you were and more.”

  “And you, Señor Embajador, are nothing they said you were.”

  Who was he really?

  “Come child. We’ve begun so well. You don’t want to join all these other clerks of love—insisting I find a fixed address.”

  I stood there in the moonlight listening to him hammering away at love. At retrograde, reactionary love that shuts the door on change, at baseless, insubstantial love—a pious vow like peace on earth or universal brotherhood. How love imposes closure, a passivity—not to choose but to be chosen. Love as an end to creativity, to questing, to living …

  And though there was not a single premise I could not have dismantled, there was something in the whole, in the relentless energy of the assault, an echo of something faceless yet familiar, that I had glimpsed before.

  “Still, if we must have hypocrisy,” he said, his delight evident by now, “I much prefer the hypocrisy of women to that of men, don’t you? I mean that for a woman, just as for a man, to delight in evil and to love both act upon the greater horror of solitude as cause and effect. But a woman … a woman transforms this horror into a positive, an active quality. She nurtures it, and it, her. Even while she is loving and sinning, this horror—the fear of loss and emptiness, this fear of becoming an empty vessel—is never far from her soul. And so, with the new anti-Christ of tonight’s play, women share a special genius for evil, do you not think so? And a special sensitivity to the solitude it implies. Thus do they love and sin more intensely than a man, and it is this that nurtures him in his pursuit of them—even as he himself indeed becomes more … womanly.”

  So we played on under a watchful sky. The smile, the candour calculated to disarm. Into every woman’s life walks at least one like him, the consummate player who knows all the steps of the dance, the feints, the pretended disinterest. How to make a show of hating hypocrisy, how to make himself an ally of the worm in her soul. And then, for all his mastery and virtuosity, to win completely, absolutely, he has to break the rules. The same rules that have served him so well.

  Silvio broke the rules, but only after he had ground me down, outplayed me at a game I played with all my heart but only half my mind, a game I’d never seriously imagined losing. I never imagined how.

  Hot with wine, the tumult of the evening—with years of games—my blood ignited. I had had enough of moonlight. I put my fingers to his lips, the lips of Leonor’s lover. I had had enough of talk. I put my fingers to his heart, show me where it hurts, show me how. I placed his fingertips beneath my breast. Say it here, yes, and here, yes, and yes and here. God, my Lord God, how I wanted this, with a want and a craving that crept and called in me like madness. At that moment I would have permitted him anything, had he only asked and not taken. At that moment I would have gone with joy … He could have swept me up and brought me to his bed through the whole crowded ballroom.

  He could have told me I was his second choice.

  †maids of honour, handmaidens

  †folding screens

  †young one, little one

  JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ

  Alan Trueblood, trans.

  Silvio that I could err and place my love

  in one as vile as you has made me see

  how heavy a weight sin’s evil is to bear,

  how harsh desire’s vehemence can be.

  Sometimes I think my memory deceives:

  how could it be that I in truth did care

  for one embodying traits I most despise,

  whose every word of love conceals a snare?

  Dearly I wish whenever my eyes behold you

  that I could deny a love so badly flawed;

  yet, with a moment’s thought, I realize

  there is no cure save bruiting it abroad.

  For crimes of love admit no expiation

  save to confess and face humiliation.

  UNDERWORLD

  11 Dec [19]94 Mexico City

  BULL ROAR OF A GREAT BOULEVARD. Over the meridian squats a replicant Arc de Triomphe—new world Champs Elysees, swift metallic flocks, Elysian van of horns trumpeting triumph. Maniacal rose-bowl parade fun / knelled through the stone archway. Arco Triunfal that heralds my allegorical arrival / portalled portent, gather your omens where ye may.

  Fifteen unmarked lanes each side—a shoaling river of cars it takes ten minutes to ford. Never cross on WALK crossing at the corner is for suicidal sitting ducks, never stop looking left and right J-Run don’t walk in the middle of the block. Run headswivelling incessant—run graceless run. Thrill of danger in my guts—let’s call this fun, more than I’ve had in years.

  Headswimming chestpained bends on the far shore. The air’s most travestied region—two kilometres above the sea. I walkandwalk ears ringing, spots of darkness skating in my eyes like waterbugs. Copper tongued—my mouth is full of blood but no it’s this air this—tasty, odorous, colour of ash—gas.

  Sharp right at the next corner into the quake zone. Low rent housing in the middle of the business core ten years after the Big One—five minutes’ walk to work at the stock exchange buy now! Upscale vagrant lots of rubble—foundered tumblewalls, concrete wracked and insubstantial. Catch glimpses of colour, laundrystrung or hampered, ladies hauling water in oilcans.

  See stone-soled children play rubblefield football, while infant archaeologists—solemn, slow—sort crushed rock and cokebottle potsherds.

  Olfactory gusto—¿Te gusta, a ti?—to smell is to taste is to swim in an excremental infusion a million molecules of dogbaby-shit-per-cubic-metre-tea, but flowers too and frying onions tobacco soap—a funksea.

  Ssst—oye, bonita. What are you drawing there in your notebook? Why don’t you draw my picture, chiquita, I love you. Whistle past the graveyard / hum the hymn hyaenal / hear the packhunters gathering for a fresh meatkill. Me. Sharp left to a main street.

  Broken sidewalks / sclerotic, narrowed arterium of vendors warey with watch straps extension cords blender blades sport socks. Adidas bags for the unathletic—pauper Samsonite. Cheap blasters blare brazen pirate music—cassettes adollar apiece—prepare to be boarded! Newsstands papervendors self-possessed resellers of obsolete textbooks—this collapsing rubble of perished technology.

  Overhead a featureless sky bounded by the sootstained enthusiasms of fifties office blocks. Bauhaus bowwow byebye. Into the Centro Histórico Centre of History, the spiral’s eye. Colonial construction, arched architecture of darkness and light, igneous and granite geometrics. The ground is porous, illfounded. Massive block-long buildings list to left and right, angling like bombed battleships sunk at shallow anchor.

  Sidewalks like cheesecloth—worn and holed—knee-deep trash-sinks—cripple machines. Beggarmakers. A million people a day stepping around holes in their lives. Or inside.

  I can’t bear to see the cathedral. Not today.

  O happy day I stumble onto the Palacio de Bellas Artes—Palace of the Beautiful Arts—whither the ugly ones?—but this place is a dream of white marble domes and columns and muscled friezes and awestruck I mount the broad steps. Surely they will bar me entry to this mosque of loveliness. Inside, unshod, sandals in my hands I walk the cool parquet. Soaring murals of pain and blood, insane greed and longings betrayed. And at the margins, pale glimpses of my bookfed ignorance of this land writ large, ten metres high. Walls a soulswept panorama, floors cryptcold—above, a skull-lifting cupola a cranial vault / brain pan trepanned by a chromatic stainglass EXPLOSION. Vertigo, a slumping on the stairs.

  Señorita, you’re not unwell? Skinny guard skinny moustache gentle eyes rustygun. No I’m not unwell. Sometimes the beauty is too much, no? Yes, señor, sometimes the beauty is too much. Gracias—a thousand graces, I’m all right now.

  Outside across the street a fifty-storey office tower, the only one around. Tower of Babel of Rubble-in-waitin
g, detumescence forestalled. Earthquaked it will swing like a pendulum like a lightbuoy a lightning rod for calamity.

  Down into the metro, embowelled earth / refuge from the thunderbolt sky, this copper air.

  BIENVENIDOS AL METRO DE MEXICO—WELCOME / WILKOMMEN / BIENVENUS / NAHUATL SUN SALUTATION—100 STATIONS / 200 KILOMETRES OF TRACK / FIVE MILLION PEOPLE MOVED DAILY HALF A MILLION KILOMETRES—to the moon and back through the shortcut guts of the underworld. To the dead lands. Troglodyte sons of the dog, fetching the bones of a lost race of men. No Eloi beyond this point, abandon all hope, ye the well-heeled who enter here.

  Waiting, waiting, the platform a dammed flood of passengers massing—a streaming anthill, a hive. Xenophobic flutter in my guts flushed like quail. Rising pressure a high distant whine a rising wind—heralding an ochre rubbertired train … dopplered deceleration. People dis- and embarking, turbulent collidings.

  But even whirled and battered, half-drowned, I am schooled in this people’s incomprehensible restraint, their regret, absence of malice: these trains affront an outraged, deepheld courtesy.

  Packed cars, stockyard buzzer, swish of doors. Basset-eyed gentleman of the primordial school—broad-knotted polyester tie, frayed collars and cuffs, impeccably clean—half-stands to offer me his seat. I smile in declining, strange cheek-tweaking musculation this. Salmon in sardine cans, the diffident press of bodies—hairspray, aftershave, mesquite, soap. Censered return to the olfactory sea.

  The ochre-train’s vulcan whine rises and coils whiplike over its groaning burden. This human cargo, this packtrain of burrowing burritos spurred by the neo-gachupines. These tender-hearted llamas on the Andean brink of despair. Inframundo en llamas. Landlocked submariners—what’s the weather like up there? Pressganged landsmen who inwardly cringe at each sonar ping, at the sinister wash of ventilation props.