Hunger's Brides

by W. Paul Anderson

  HARLEQUIN: TABLE

  THE SECOND CALL came three days later. February 17th, 1995.

  Friday night about eight, Catherine asleep. We’d put a brave face on things since the call on Valentine’s Day. We didn’t need to talk things over. Madeleine and I were solid, we’d been through all this, been through tough times and come out the other side. Things were almost as before. No reason to cancel our little dinner party. Things were almost as before.

  Roast kid in curry. One of the dishes I loved to prepare. Gas oven banked low for the last stage, fresh papadams spattering in oil on the range. Madeleine playing cheerful sous-chef, bright smile, red lipstick, full kiss on the lips, black dress. She stacked the dishes we would need on the antique sideboard, started setting the table for four.

  “No tablecloth?” I asked, mildly surprised.

  “No. Not tonight.”

  The furniture we’d bought just after our wedding no longer suited us. The dining room table was by a designer in Milan, a post-industrial statement in steel with which we had once seemed to agree. A blued and riveted whip-steel with an oiled finish the brochure had described as ‘salmon,’ salmon blues, salmon pinks. Lightly oiled to the eye but dry to the touch. Like the skin of snake, Beulah had said, the one time I brought her here. She called this our Euclidean showhome.

  I must have been insane.

  Chris and Mariko were due any minute, the couple we somehow ended up seeing the most often. Certainly I hadn’t hit it off particularly with any of Madeleine’s colleagues. Chris and I had been the last of a hiring binge in the mid-eighties, the end of a golden age of social investment. The youngest turks now on staff, the only ones of our generation to cross the bar, we were well into our forties, married in the same year, destined it would seem to be friends or enemies. He’d cut off his ponytail a couple of years ago, leaving me the last retrograde. He was adored by his students, though in a different way now. We’d done some whoring around together in the early, formative days at the College of Infidelity. A double date or two. I was looking forward to talking to him about a pleasure in teaching I’d felt reawakening in me.

  I glanced out the kitchen window toward the hot tub, saw the plastic cover crumpled off to one side. Odd. Madeleine almost never used it during the day. I walked out onto the deck in my shirtsleeves, the warm chinook blowing around me. I looked up at a sky swept clean, extraordinarily clear. Stars glittered overhead, hung glorious in vast suspension. The stars pause for us, it appears, when we pause to see. The glitter, perhaps, their stilling from the velocities they travel at when we look away. A bright arctic shawl—shaken out, arrested in its fall, it hung over the house, the yard, with a weight. The hard weight of starlight.

  I replaced the cover. Maybe the wind blew it off.

  I heard the doorbell as I came back in. The porch light was on. They waved through the glass outer door; a couple with their height differential had to be fun. He, the tall, stooped Slav; she, the Japanese imp, mad potter with a wicked tongue and a merciless eye. He seemed to bend more to her each year—elm over a stone fence. Madeleine came up beside me and waved them in.

  “She left another message today on the machine,” she said.

  My eyes asked the question.

  “No she didn’t leave a name. It seemed to be long distance. Where would she be calling from do you think?” she asked, smiling towards our guests, who’d stooped to take off their boots.

  “Madeleine …”

  “She called to offer her condolences.”

  February 17, 1995. Three hundred years to the day—to the hour, who knows?—from the death of Father Antonio Núñez de Miranda. Another of the things I didn’t know then.

  What on earth had I been thinking, bringing Beulah here? This was to be my way of letting her down easy. Was this really what I told myself—while I fucked her on my wife’s bed, on the dining room table, in the hot tub, on the deck? For nine months I had been in the grip of a sexual obsession unlike anything I’d ever known—and played with it like a mindless idiot with a wolf. I would have stopped at nothing, let her look everywhere, touch anything, would have broken every trust and did—anything to buy my release.

  And what should have loomed in my mind like an icon of superstitious dread, I’d converted into the rueful souvenir of a reckless boyhood stunt. Whew, lucky to get away, narrow escape … a difficult student. For the past three days I felt it all stirring up again. Was she still in that ground-floor apartment down by the river? Across from the park? How was she? Not well, apparently.

  Remembering her. What we’d done. I couldn’t get enough of her. That body, so slender by then, small calves, full buttocks, high round breasts. Long slopes of famished skin…. But we were going nowhere, she and I. So I let myself see that beauty, invisible to her. The end nearing, I looked into those eyes.

  Bright paradox of the human eye: flexing, clenching with life, yet strangely inorganic—jewel box of a lost fascination … like fire, like the sea. Glass eye of a china doll, a radial pattern of facets and flaws—bullet through glass—spokes to a crystalline wheel. If the soul somewhere exists, it would not be as butterfly or lotus, it would be mineral. A precious stone, like obsidian. Jade. She taught me this.

  Eyes jade green. A gold corona rings the iris, threading through the spokes. Out from the centre, along each spoke an accretion—like coral, like rust … a burnt-amber wheel embedded, encrusted in the green of a stream.

  One memory twists now in my mind’s eye like a blade.

  Table of whip-steel. Your knees drawn back for me, heels hard on the table edge. My wife’s red silk negligee, too big for you. I stand, enter you, the window of your soul opens to me. A rill, a shimmer, a quiet welling … the bed of a stream.

  AQUEDUCT

  [Mexico City, 16 Dec. 1994]

  THERE IS A WORLD outside this room. It exists. More real to me more true than I ever could have dreamed. Splendid in its independence from me. Teetering empire of the Fifth Sun, here I will learn to do what remains to do. Find my eyes of wonder. Walk a tightrope through a flame of ice.

  And I will find you. What you left behind for us, for me, after three hundred years. I will make you speak to me. I will finish this. And I will make him see.

  Am I idiot enough to think she is only there inside those walls? She is everywhere. Look! Here. She is on the new two-hundred peso bill! Backed by presidential signatures, legal tendresses of treasurers. Thank them for this, her daily omnipresence.

  Juana, I have laid your beautiful face in the hands of beggars. And they have shown me where to turn, where to find you. Let the milkeyed beggars be my guides. Wedded to their hunger, uprooted from their lands, turned away at every city gate. The end approaches. See it in their inturned eyes, this return to the land, to the aleph. Let the end then be a return to the beginning, to see it as for the first time.1

  Nepantla. Your little village on the slopes of the smoking stone, Popocatépetl. Miracled birthplace on the volcanic margins of things. I will find you there, Juanita, in the cell where you were born.

  Fond farewell to this my flophouse away from home—dingyroom, armoire battered under a hundred hasty paintcoats. Silverframed portrait of the baby jesus ruddycheeked and blond just above the queensize headboard of sin. His Sacred Heart—baled and bloody in its razorwire halo of thorns. In its Galilean necktie, belching aortal fire.

  Taxi ride to the world’s largest bus terminal. See it just ahead the purling gates of an iron embroidery. Flurry of a tropical dawn—taxis taxis taxis stalled back of trucks offloading pop, chips and Bimbo snacks. Bundled newspapers slung to the curb. Little dense bombs of dread set to whisk us away to a disquieting dislocation.

  Ancient porter in rags approaches on enormous bare feet like muddy paddles. Scurvylegged and rickety. Let me carry your bag, hijita, you are thin. And you, abuelo, are very old. Let me walk beside you then to the gate. All right. Dignified nod at the hundred peso note, handoff at the gate to a uniformed porter with an iron dolly. ¿A dónd
e va, jovencita?—your ultimate destination dolly.

  Trundle me up to Nepantla, home of Sor Juana. Ahh, this is not so easy, young one.

  It’s not far—I have a three-hundred-year-old map in my head, so I know. Yes but to go direct you must go to another place. Terminal de Autobuses del Oriente. Busstop of the Terminal Orientals.

  On the east of the city. Yes it’s far. Yes from this terminal here also you can get there. But you must go through Cuernavaca in one of these buses like executive jets. To the city where Cortés built his palace—

  After he pulled Tenochtitlán to the ground.

  Don’t waste time at the counter, buy your ticket on board. Well then amigo let’s make this quick. Take me to the one leaving next.

  And we are rising now up in our bus like a leerjet—TVs and headsets of success, lacy curtains and courtesy bar. Tissue-paper headrest-covers against the spread of skullpeeling mange. And even with this it is a joy to be out of this megacity of Dis / that has an end after all. A first-class fear escape.

  Rising up out of the cupped-palm in the sky that is this Valley of Mexico, up through a vitriolic sunrise, sulphate strata of copper and zinc. Winding up the coral stead of a blueblack asphalt road, bends blasted from a pale puzzled brickrock. Gouged bluffcrests sprout stunted pines, asphyxiate and gnarled. Needle-clump branch-ends like clipped poodles gasping throatslit for breath.

  Up and up into a raked light, into the impending rumour of a sky of faintest blue. Rising rising to the light. At the first summit through slantsmoked rays of sunrise, blurred silhouettes of volcanoes six kilometres high cast shadows westward and down through the gloomy lungstew.

  And another summit and another, unto the confirmation of a blue empyrean assumption!

  Now ahead—like a sudden door opening onto the sea a broad plain dappled like a feathercape of greens.2 Cloudshadows skimming like tugs over a vast busy bay. Orchard grids of hunter green. Watercourses a treelined serpent twine of forest greens coiling through emerald fields of cane.

  [Cuernavaca / 17 Dec. 1994]

  Take me straight to the Palace of the Marquis of the Vale! Cortés’s belvedere above his vale of tears. Hernán Cortés, first lawyer to conquer a universe …

  His palace of toy Disney turrets stamped pure Castile—no trace no suspect hint of Moorish grace. No arches arcades no fountain garden in a courtyard more armoury than Xanadu. Is this the static architecture of your monolithic dreams? Views of your volcanoes forever lost now in the swirling carbondated mists.

  O marechal of martial-awe! before I’m done here I will retrace your path of Conquest. But in reverse. Roll up / roll back rescind the sanguinary carpet of your welcome.

  From here all the way back to the Yucatán.

  On down through the sugar haciendas, third-class tour in a rustred Bluebird schoolbus. Racing over narrow roads through tall green cane. Water glints in the ditches from sprung aqueducts, dripfeeding caneworkers’ vegetable plots no bigger than a tablecloth. Children smile and wave at the passing bus every window open to the hot gusts of afternoon.

  Running dogs gnashing at the tires.

  Señorita, you are bound for the hacienda here in Cocoyóc?—but please you must. There is always a later bus for the mountains. You must see this place more beautiful than Cortés’s own hacienda in Temexico. Just follow the aqueduct to its end. You cannot get lost.

  Walk down along the white-arched aqueduct sprayed with official slogans. Red white and green of the PRI—ruling Party of Institutionalized Revolution—stamped on the arcadian architecture of yet another lawyer’s oxymoron dream. Every foot of this aqueduct built by slaves, this causeway too should be lined with skulls like the Aztec carvers made.

  Through the gates and onto the grounds. A walled colony for your security and peace of mind. Flowerflanked red gravel paths among condos lining a fertile crescent fairway. This—I know this now—is a bad mistake, but does the pilgrim come so far only to turn her face away? Forward hadji!

  White golfcarts beating up and down the pathways ferrying room-service trays beneath bellcovers like burnished breastplates. Field ambulances back from the battlelines of affluence. Wandering over the fairways pale golfers—dazed wildlife stalked by brown-skinned caddies. In tow, their aluminum-alloy travois. Mesoamerican wheeled technology still and ever reserved for toys.

  Lush flowering trees—jacarandas, flamboyanes, African tulip shading unused swimming pools.

  And then I am inside the main compound, and this place really is … a palace of dreams …

  In, past the wading pools and arbours and cool arcades. Children’s laughshriek voices fade … and I walk on in a kind of hush.

  I follow the aqueduct. Ferns and giant rhododendrons, swivelheaded, lost. Reader’s benches stranded in stands of bougainvillaea fifteen metres high, thick-blossomed veils of shellpink and vermilion.

  Massive spidercling of creepers … dove-grey walls of adzed fieldstone, mortared.

  What is this place? How can this even be?

  I almost turned away.

  Wishing ponds of waterlily and orchid. Figs and lemon trees and oranges—dash and blur of hummingbirds. Faint birdsong and cicadas.

  Here, señorita, take this. Ándele, take it I have another for myself. Oh, you have hurt your hand? I used to weep here too. As a girl, I worked here cleaning cottages. I had other reasons to cry then.

  Small brown womanbird, wren-sharp features and curly-hair. Hardbead eyes. Shy sparrowgirl pressed into her skirts. To see this once I have brought my daughter. We live near the border now, in the North. It is a desert. You have not yet been to the waterwheel? Daughter, can we show this young lady what we have seen?

  Behind one last wall the terminus of the aqueduct. Massive, reluctant, slowturned … a moss-clasped wheel. Black wood split and smoothworn by the ceaseless rush and plash and plunge of clear

  lithe

  water.

  Tissue of muscled light, rent and splaying—knitting, mending as it falls. And you feel …

  this plunge of beauty

  open a hole in your chest

  and plunging down through this

  your wide-cracked chest you feel

  You feel—

  this beauty bursting down through your lungs and down to pound—pound the drumhead of your brightwashed soul. Your breath quakes with it / you are breathing thunder. And shaking you, singing through you like a reed it asks how could they not feel this?—not see through the holes in their chests.

  Sun.

  Stone.

  Shade.

  Green.

  These things have no need of Conquests. Why wasn’t this enough? An Emperor on his knees offered them a universe. They could have lived here as gods, as angels in the flesh.

  As ordinary men.

  Conquistadors you should have been the ones to kneel! Kneel on blackrot gangrene knees. Kneel on your iron greaves. Ever onward christian soldiers you all died broke—didn’t you. Bleeding gold shitting piles of dysenteric gold3—dying poor, dreaming still. Deliverer! goldshackled dragonslayer—merchant’s dupe—they made fortunes off you, the bankers’ burros. You traded your own blood for promissory notes.

  Conquistador … you had only to accept the world to save your soul. The world as it was offered. But all you saw was gold. Coins laid flat on the clench of your lids.

  Your last will and testament, Advocate—your last temptation. So far from home so afraid to waver. Liberator. To weaken was to die overrun undone, annihilated by this siren-singing continent. Land of monstrous mystery. Grotesque mockery, Satanic Eden.

  But you could have asked for the power to make Eden more beautiful than new. Where were your eyes of wonder? Who put out our eyes …

  I need to understand. To try.

  Was this a place of savagery because they lacked the names? The naming that keeps the wilderness at bay. So what about the nameless places inside? And as we lose the names of things—shapes and colours, taste and scents does all revert to desert again?—
/>   Perdón, señorita, you are from el capital?

  What?

  Then maybe from Spain?

  No.

  Canadá?—but your Spanish—I only ask … I have never been to Spain, but I do not think they have such places there. El Canadá … you must have water like this everywhere. Not everywhere? You see, niña, not even in Canada.

  Shy sparrowchild straining to grasp this. Lateborn to a grateful mother, godsent on a faded prayer of old rose. No keep the handkerchief, I can embroider another to cry in. You are leaving now. Will you walk with us to the gate?

  We walk out along the aqueduct. Steps reversed hush undone breathless echoes reverting to the world human voices wake us …

  Your father is a diplomat? you are with the embassies? There are many here for weekends. To get away from the city. I knew many, I cleaned their sheets.

  No? Then here, señorita … I have maybe something else to show you who have come so far … See? So many condominios each with a swimming pool. So much water. You see, Daughter, and no one swimming. Come closer. You too señorita, si no le molesta. Let me show you why, I think. No, it hasn’t changed—You see the surface of the pools. These scales? They come from the trees. All the pools are the same.

  Do you not think these look like human skin?

  All night on buses up into the mountains the drone of echoes in their drowning fall …

  You have come alone, señorita?

  So far from home, your family.

  Are you not very lonely?

  It is not often we meet in a place like this.

  But wait, it looks like skin no?

  Will you stay the night with us? Our hotel is poor but we have room.

  I can’t I have to go … on.

  You think this is why no one uses the pools? I always wanted to ask them.

  You have come alone, so far from home?

  You know Moctezuma and Cortés both came here for the waters? Not together of course.

  You have places like this everywhere in Canada?