And that was all. But was it, truly?
Why did he come to America? the prosecutors would not fail ask, after their false witness had given her testimony. They would say it was to hide himself in the wilds of a demonic country, as a place conducive to the practise of his secret rites. No. He had served his king, he was tired of war, a commoner who loved books and Spain equally, and who dreamed now of exploring. But what first brought him to Xochitl’s village? What was the source of his lifelong fascination with the escapes of the sorcerer Ocelotl, or with the verses of the poet-emperor of Texcoco who had built a temple there to the Unknown God? I had only to remember some of the books in Abuelo’s collection to glimpse the paths he had travelled. I had only to think on this to see that it was a collection of just such works that I myself had greatly added to. I asked myself now if it was not just possible that he had come in search of that secret flower that the Conquest had failed to produce but had not quite succeeded in destroying, and to which the greatness of Spain could once have been grafted, or by which revived. What name could one give to such a search, of which Abuelo might have been only half aware, and yet which I had, just perhaps, half-heard woven through all our talks and into the silences of his life? Of our life together, which they would now try to make a lie.
And I had only to consider these researches seriously for a moment to realize that Abuelo would surely have written. If only notes—knowing that these had to remain strictly hidden, perhaps to be destroyed at his death. And if he had truly heard Death’s step in the courtyard that night, he might have been burning his life’s work at the firepit as I slept. My fear took on a new guise: that his writings were not destroyed but concealed—at the hacienda, its hiding place a secret my mother had taken to the grave—or in some hidden recess behind the bookshelf at Uncle Juan’s, near me all those years. And that the Prosecutor would next bring forward these papers to ask if I had seen them—claim to find it incredible that I had not, had not in fact based my own heresies upon them—before demanding that I repudiate them, that I watch them burned before my eyes.
How better to explain this rage like the pique of a child whenever I heard them—and I had only to close my eyes in this darkness to hear the holy doctors judging the beliefs of the country of my birth as superstition and heresy. Or whenever I felt them turning to derision the loves and passions of my childhood—the riddles and puzzles, the hidden forms and secret knowledge.
There were answers I would never have, fears and doubts I could no longer let myself entertain, but what was true beyond any doubt was that the hidden connections I had sought in stories and in the world all around me were real: the flesh and blood people in my life, the stories I was not to be told. No need even to close my eyes to see him, a man in his prime, a fine horseman riding into Xochitl’s village, and now see her as she must have been then, before the accident. His daughter’s age, with Amanda’s grace, for that grace had first been hers. A young woman wise beyond her years, except perhaps foolish in love, even as one of his own daughters had been once. And how those two must have talked, for Xochitl had stories quite the match for his, of jaguars and walking fish, trout that were not there and the masks of god. Eventually a thing had broken that had made their friendship impossible—and yet after all the injustices of the Conquest, he must surely have seen this as but a feather in the scale. Perhaps it was precisely this, the scale of the incommensurate, that left him unable to resolve things in his mind. Like a problem with zero in algebra. Impossible, yet impossible to abandon altogether. Over the past few months it had occurred to me that she’d chosen to come to live with us as an act of contrition—to serve the daughter of her friend by nursing the daughter of her lover. But though Xochitl had lost her place in her village, she would not have agreed to come to Nepantla if she had not loved and trusted my grandfather. There was something between them she did not wish to twist—they never spoke again, and lived together until he died. Friends for life.
The untold stories, the unspoken correspondences between the legends, were real, as real as mountains, and strong. And it had become troubling to think on the ways in which their hidden influences and sympathies had not ceased. Is it possible to walk a path all our lives and not know—even refuse it, to think we have turned our back on it—even as we think we are following another, making each choice at every crossroads for reasons we do not see, and which might as well be the opposite of what we think they are? When every choice seems a turning away. And might one not end thereby in hating choice itself …?
And so who was to say that one mention of Maimonides was all I had learned from him of the Jews, whose god they seek everywhere to know by his secret name. But if that god were my grandfather’s, how painful that I should only hear of this from his accusers. Had he ever tried to tell me? How much of this might my mother have known, if I had known how to ask? I had wondered if he was trying to protect me, but perhaps he only hoped I might be fearless. It had worked for one of his daughters.
Without so much as rising from the rocking chair where she sat nursing the baby, my mother had stopped Diego with a word and a look, and sent him slinking off with a question. You do know innocence? She looked at me then, another question in those black eyes, but I had as yet no idea what had happened. And I remember Xochitl, hair glowing softly in the light, her face strangely youthful, I thought, as she watched my mother. She was standing in the courtyard, a few steps beyond the kitchen door. At her bare feet, a rag lay forgotten. Mother’s eyes met Xochitl’s, whose face had split into a grin of almost painful width. The two looked at each other for a long moment as though each daring the other to laugh first. Just then the baby coughed and cried, fists like tiny angry planets making small arcs in the air. My mother frowned down at the balled hands, the bald head grimacing, and with a little shush gave him her breast. Xochitl bent stiffly to pick up the rag.
Eleven years they had lived together, raised daughters together. Between those two women lay an entire world that I could scarcely begin to guess at. The moment had passed, but it had happened. I no longer doubt there had been others, though this must have been one of the last. In a few days I would be in Mexico. In a few weeks, Amanda and Xochitl would leave for a destination they would not reach. But that night Xochitl served us dinner herself, for the only time that I can recall. I was relieved, this once, that Amanda had remained in the pantry, for it had been just that morning that she’d asked if she was to go to Mexico as my maid. When I saw Xochitl coming in with our plates I jumped up to help, but she answered in Nahuatl, “No, let this be my privilege.”
The main course was a mole, a meat dish in a sauce of chilli and chocolate. While this was now common in the recipes of Puebla, xocolatl had once been a sacred aliment and Xochitl had never cooked with it or, if she did, had never served it to us. Instead of making a solemn event of it though, Xochitl was relaxed and smiling as she limped about. It seemed now that around my mother she had always been conscious of her hip, standing very straight when she spoke with her, often waiting to move until she had left the room, out of pride, I’d assumed. But I wonder tonight if it wasn’t, instead, consideration.
As Xochitl leaned down to clear my plate, I murmured in Nahuatl, “Delicious, Xochita, but that was lamb, wasn’t it?” I was half-joking, but she had a way of squinting that could make me laugh even when the joke was mine.
“Tepescuintle,” she said, then hobbled off towards the kitchen, leaving all the day’s tensions draining from me in laughter—gales, carcajadas. At the far end of the long table, Mother had looked up from nursing Dieguito, her long brows raised. Escuintle, she knew. A Mexican word Abuelo had often used for a naughty child. So I explained, feeling the humour of the moment fading, that it was short for tepescuintle. She had only been mildly curious and I regretted starting, for not only was she unlikely to find it funny, I might end up getting Xochitl into trouble. And I felt confused, as well, for only now was I giving serious thought to who had actually killed the dog. Seeing Xochi
tl, smiling, hobbling around the table, I knew it had not been her after all.
Tepescuintle, I began, cringing inwardly, was a small, voiceless dog the Mexicans used to fatten … to eat. And even as I said this, I recalled that just the night before, when I had told the story of the bridegroom impaled on the wedding tree, my mother had not been amused in the least. She didn’t laugh now. But to my surprise, the hint of a smile played over her lips.
“But you like animals,” I said.
“There was always something not right with that one.”
“Is he gone for good?”
“I would say the dog is.”
“And you’d just let Diego come crawling back.” From long habit I shot this back before I’d really heard her. I saw her joke too late.
The baby began to fuss again, as if needing those great black eyes as much as milk. When they met his little fox eyes, his fists eased again and loosed stubby petals fingering the air. She crooned to him a lullaby in a singing voice it shocked me to hear.
But by then I had decided to be furious that she should find this a thing to joke about after what Diego had done. How could she keep a man around that I knew she did not love? Had she loved my father, at least? Love was not everything, she said. No, not for her, obviously. I would understand when I was older. Truly I hoped not—
“He was older—he didn’t understand, did he, why love was not everything. Wasn’t that why he spent so much time away?”
“Maybe he knew he couldn’t stay.”
Was she saying he had avoided us?—why, so we could get used to it?
“I’m sorry if this hurts you—you’re too young to be hearing this, but we’ve run out of time, you and I….”
“Hearing what.”
“Yes, Inés, he avoided me, as you put it. But the one he avoided most of all was you.”
It was a mother’s instinct, to repeat the child’s words to convey an adult thought. I knew even then she had not been trying to hurt me, but having heard her echoing the very phrase I had used to conjure the ghost—of my father avoiding me, staying away from me, who waited only long enough to get to know me to stay away completely—the words went like a knife through my chest. She tried to go on, but I’d heard much more than I’d wanted to. Before leaving the room—so I would not cry in front of her—I asked as calmly and coldly as I could manage if she even knew what love was. If she had ever loved anyone.
The night before I was to leave for Mexico, she came to find me again in the library where I was choosing books among the shelves for the dozenth time, adding just one or two more to the already-too-many making the trunk all but immoveable. Perhaps that had been the idea after all. I had a few hours left, just time enough to finish the argument. I was sorry it had to be there. She had come to give me the fifty pesos. Her face was guarded. I saw with some satisfaction that I had hurt her.
I felt more than saw her expression soften. Perhaps it had been finding me standing in the shadows amidst the ranks of books. “This is the countryside, Inés, not Madrid or Mexico. A woman does not always get her first choice. I love his son, now.”
“Why a man at all?” I wished I hadn’t asked. I had her thoughts already about a woman’s place in the world, and her judgement on my ambitions for Mexico.
“Your father did not care for cities….” If by this she was trying to say he’d feel as she did about my plans, I did not want to hear it. In fact, I never wanted to hear her mention him again. “He was like you, Inés. He always had somewhere else to be. I had been planning to move to the city with your aunt. After your sister María was born I went back there a few times to visit. You might like it. I did, more than I expected. But your grandfather had already rented the hacienda in Nepantla for me. Most fathers would have disowned their daughter. You only saw me helping him, but first he helped me. He showed me a way to make a life for myself here, and for his granddaughters. Whether your father returned or not. And in Nepantla I would be easy to find. About what I said …”
If she would just let it lie, just let me leave like this, not make it any more painful than it was.
“You weren’t wrong about everything…. So maybe it was true, he didn’t want you to love him too much. But there was another reason.” I told myself I wasn’t even listening.
“I hadn’t thought of it this way until the other night, but he might also have stayed away so he wouldn’t love us quite so much.”
“I should go to bed.” It was too late for this, too late to see the past other than as it was.
“Yes. Tomorrow will be a long day.”
When I did not move, she went ahead of me. I thought she had gone, when I heard her call to me. She stood framed in the doorway, behind her a few stars. Among them beamed a planet white and still. I could not see her face.
“As for the other … I was distracted with the baby. I thought you two were too young. But you could have come to me. I would never have let any of my father’s granddaughters be hurt.” With that, she was gone.
She did not come out the next morning to the wagon, though for once she had not gone out to work. She had stayed in her room, but had left the door open. Amanda had gone out into the fields very early, and did not come back to say good-bye. Xochitl held me briefly, but we did not speak.
My father’s granddaughters. My mother had been thinking, then, of Abuelo’s other bequest of fifty pesos, as much a message from Abuelo to Xochitl as a gift for Amanda. It would be four years before I learned of its existence, another twenty before I learned from Magda that Abuelo had borrowed the hundred pesos from Diego. But I had remembered my mother’s words clearly, for it had been an odd way of putting things. It was the one concession I had ever heard her make to the game of twins Amanda and I had used to play. It had struck me as generous even then, and had only deepened my confusion, generosity not being a quality I had associated with her. Generous. I did not know her at all.
Friends, enemies, it seemed to make little difference now. Bishop Maldonado’s gentle remonstration on the subject of confession felt not so very different from being asked by Núñez if I had ever said good-bye to anyone I had loved. It felt some days like being asked if I have ever loved at all.
Other friends came to the locutory, and after a few such visits I no longer doubted their sincerity, but neither were the choices that my friends urged upon me easily distinguishable from those of my adversaries. On the question of winning the protection of Núñez by my confession, my friends were divided by how full and how sincere it should be. They fell between two extremes—of a partial confession as a tactic of expediency, or a sincere expression of contrition.
But surely those who urged sincerity saw how this might well entangle me more deeply in questions of heresy, and could the camp of expediency not see that my confessor was attentive and experienced, not easily deceived? Even this was not the true dilemma, because it admitted of a third possibility: choosing to face the Holy Office. And in its implications that third avenue left me more dependent on Núñez than ever. For if commanded to recant the negative finezas I could not choose to, even knowing the consequences. Why could I not, because I was right and they were wrong? I might be a heretic, but not in this.
Before all the Holy Community of Saints and Angels and the Celestial Tribunal I still ask—and ask again even after all that has come—what is a heretic? Giordano Bruno’s case was clear. He had simply pursued the mysteries so far as to become a stranger to the world. Galileo Galilei was no stranger to the world—and attacked nothing in the world so righteously as unquestioned authority, and the Jesuits. The manner of Hypatia’s death was Alexandria’s penalty for sorcery, but one might as well ask if Hypatia was just as truly the heretic, not for charting the flights of ravens and the courses of Sirius as her father had taught her, but for challenging barbarism and hypocrisy.
But if she was a witch, let us begin by asking if a witch is truly superstitious, for Hypatia was known to say that to teach superstitions as truths is a most terr
ible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in later years relieved of them. Or is a witch, I wonder, philosophic? All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting persons as final.
But if she was a heretic, it is as well to call Galileo a witch—his witchcraft was his method, his heresy defiance; her heresy was her eminence, her witchcraft, memory. Again of this Holy Company I ask: Is it heresy to recall an older faith? A wisdom before the Light, a fall before the Fall, a woman of more ancient tears, a sun, a son, before the Son? Is it heresy in an age of iron to remember one of gold?
What, then, does the Lord Prosecutor’s idea of heresy amount to but a fear of choice itself, and a superstition rooted in the fear of that which is older than itself?
On this night the Prosecutor made no attempt to interrupt. I was allowed to speak at length, for the secretaries to record. A witness was brought to challenge certain of my assertions, but I was allowed to question the witness in turn, though this was unusual. And yet each session had in its own way become more frightening than the last; and as I was shown courteously from that room and back into the darkness, I could no longer ignore that these fantasies were not harmless, though at first they had kept my fear from overwhelming me entirely. In the first days after Núñez left, little scenes such as these ran swift and incessantly behind my eyes—with Gutiérrez’s depiction of those chambers all I had to go on. Unusually high, windowless, stone floors, stone columns of eight sides. With time I had flooded the chamber with light, colour, turned stone to marble, iron to brass. But imagining the room differently did not make it any less likely I would one day be taken there.
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