Hunger's Brides

by W. Paul Anderson

  In the kitchens just before New Year, the five of us—Juana, Vanessa, Concepción, Asunción and I—a Creole, a Spaniard, two Indians and a mulatta (I feel just now like I should be telling a salacious joke)…. High spirits all round, general merriment. We are making one of Vanessa’s desserts for a banquet the Vicereine is giving:

  fresh-baked, unleavened wafers

  sliced apple baked between

  upon one half of the plate a bed of burnt-caramel cream, chocolate sauce

  upon the other stewed crabapple garnish

  wafers pierced by taffy cane, a waving, bannered flourish….

  Multiply by number of settings (200), assemble twenty minutes in advance and let stand until serving.

  Concepción unthinking licks her thumb and reaches up to wipe a daub of pale flour from Juana’s cheek, tanned from the orchards. Her gleaming thumb raised, flour-daub still intact, Concepción hesitates, murmuring: Your skin is dark, like Our Mother, Guadalupe. Then laughs a little and wipes the flour away.

  They will say that in the end your skin was like Guadalupe’s.

  How do I know this? I would bet my life.

  Juana and I spend the afternoon with Vanessa, copying out her recipes for an edition to be bound and sold to raise money for the convent.

  I weep, to be sitting here at a stained and rough-hewn table in a fragrant kitchen. To see her writing again! To be sitting next to her. As always, copying….

  Her handwriting is changing. The bold masculine hand everyone here claimed to find so scandalous is giving way—‘masculine’ because the lettering was once firm and full, and beautifully-formed; ‘scandalous’ because beauty of any kind in a nun is an incitation and a temptation. Handwriting.

  Who to, an incitation to what poor, pathetic creature …?

  As I look over at what she’s written her script now seems both more elaborate and more … hesitant. Go ahead, write it: feminine.

  Isn’t it here then I should also mention that, speaking so infrequently, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is developing the slightest stutter?

  Isn’t it here I try to say how this makes me feel?

  Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love.4

  You in the orchards, a wind through the pomegranates, figs and apples. Ariel—a crystal crash among the apple boughs. Pale undersides of leaves, wind-canted: the startled modesties of petticoats.

  Comfort me with apples.

  And am I supposed to copy out too the angry script of lash-strokes across her naked back? Record their obscene utterance? The colour is pink—soon, blue-welted like berries—a flailing alliteration: why not make merry on our way to damnation? The slender lash-lines straight though not parallel. Welted quill-strokes of different lengths and thicknesses—

  The way the braided cord hisses through the quilted air.

  In a convent, this too is considered manual labour.

  Is this the kind of hard-eyed observation that will save her? Then, decipher this.

  Cloud-burst, exploding thunder, torrent of rain. Then just as suddenly it stops, sun battering the gleaming stone again like waves against a cliff. Little tendrils of mist rising from the patio’s volcanic flagstones.

  Nuns in every doorway, staring out, eyes sceptical or filled with rueful wonder. Beneath a startled blue sky Juana crosses the misted yard like a lonely ghost, to see how the garden has fared. Water cascading from the roof’s carved waterspouts in clattering, prismed arcs. All eyes upon her as she nears—if she’s not careful!—hands balled into little fists, elbows bent, shoulders slightly hitched she walks briskly through the sheet of tumbling light—all eyes upon her—our collective gasp—and calmly disappears, soaked to the skin, through the arched passageway….

  Her little joke.

  The same dream, again. Write it; the record must be complete.

  You, far ahead of me on a high rolling plain, green yet bare of trees. After following you so far, so long, my legs—now a weary child’s—ache from so much walking. I can’t keep pace, can’t bear falling farther and farther behind. For a moment I panic, losing sight of you behind a hill.

  Cries of racing gulls—is this the sea you’ve never seen? Where you turn your face back to me, smile a smile of sweet release that only leaves me bound still more savagely….

  The kitchen’s lost Poetics:

  Asunción washing up, Concepción putting water in an olla to heat for mint tea. Darkly beautiful, compact, determined, fiercely blushing now, expression critical, Vanessa stands off to one side of a table spread with sculpted dishes heaped with colour.

  Juana’s forty-sixth birthday. Our little surprise party, just the five of us. Caught off guard, trying to deflect our attention, Juana says to the room at large that Vanessa’s such a genius it would take an eight-day week, un octavo dia, to make another like her. I feel a pricking of unworthy jealousy….

  Chicharrón salad—baked pork rind, fresh basil, picked by Juana’s own hands, vinegar.

  Plato fuerte—sauce of ripe Manzanillo mangoes, freshly puréed, uncooked. Chicken stock, flaked chillies. Sauce served cold. Fresh-caught whitefish, amaranth seeds floating in a clear, dark sauce round a mould of bulgar wheat flecked with chilled cucumber….

  Dessert—the smell of baking peaches wafting through the low vaulted room—how I love this room, it seems the only place we can be happy now….

  Another private masterpiece that will never grace the refectory’s communal tables.

  Near evening, already dusk. You have not returned from the orchards. I run a bath for you: you will be tired. Into the steaming water what scents shall I pour, what essences shall I choose for you to carry into this night’s sleep? To cloak you, every mound and furrow, and still at dawn like fallen dew: cassis, angelica root, Italian bergamot, cloves? Marjoram, spearmint, olibanum, rose? Cinnamon … I pore over bottled roots and barks and essences like a wizard, a curandera over her healing incantations.

  Can you be healed of this? Can I heal myself?

  The water cools a little, the moment passes. A little later you come in, weary, as I expected. You see the water and smile, beginning to undress. No wait! An eyebrow arches—your dusty face—as if to ask, What’s the matter?

  It’s ice-cold, I lie, putting on more water to heat, making you wait, cruelly.

  Gardening, cooking, embroidery … Carlos asks me if this sudden interest in women’s work—work she would never permit herself in here—is a parody of feminine servility?

  I am thinking of this as I watch her silent among the weavers, taking her place at a loom, half-listening as the others weave and spin, telling stories to pass the time. Sitting across from her as she begins to work the loom, hesitantly at first and then more surely, I see her look up at me, dark eyes shining with awe, as a lost skill returns to her forgivingly from a bygone time, as though it were only yesterday she was girl in Panoayan….

  Dedicated, rat-sated, battered, ears in tatters—convent cats in their leisure hours stalking wary birds. Juana watching.

  The next day the curandera returns to her potions, a delicate case, this one, I mutter.

  If what the ancient Mexicans believed is true—that a colour, a sound, a scent is as significant to a ceremony as any word—and if to change any one of these recasts the whole, couldn’t this extend even to the play’s outcome? Dear Lord, let this be so!

  If I can’t change that outcome with words, why not with scents and flavours? How am I to believe there’s no such thing as magic when I have heard you speak of this so often, when I see you now under this spell?

  Carlos always says the first step to understanding a thing is observing well … a careful description of its properties. The bruja unstops her bottles, passing them beneath her nose, one by one, eyes closed: the cream finish of sandalwood. Lavender’s true, high notes. The rasp of pepper, deep and feral. Rose: warm and cream, but fine. Nardo, rich butterfat; with jasmin—low-pitched and gritty—its perfect complement. Violet: cool and powdery. Lirio root: a mu
shroom’s musk—what will it say to the hard-eyed observer to smell that on her skin? Anise mixed with bergamot—a baby’s pink fragrance, flesh of velvet creases.

  Is this madness? I said I would try anything. Shall I wring my hands over what right I have, again? Am I not entitled to a little hope? Of undoing the hex I’ve helped put on you?

  The cool, sweet convergence of vanilla and cassis, the eggshell whiff of aldehidos, the leather waft of habatonia. Regal essence of Acahar….

  From a dream of flowers I wake before dawn, looking to put names to the scented melodies in your bathwater: Temptation, Incantation, Jubilation …

  Obsession.

  Still in bed, arm flung across my eyes, I hear you moving through the darkened rooms.

  I follow you everywhere now. You hardly seem to notice, like a wild creature grown used to me. I stand by you tending flowers; I cut a shock of white narcissus blossoms for our table.

  You turn to me, your shirt splashed with pollen.

  Gold. Carlos has already carefully explained this. The colour of the West as the evening star sinks into the swamp of night. Where souls taken prisoner in childbirth lie in wait.

  I kiss your hands. On such and such a day, someone here will soon be saying, her palms tasted of clay….

  Weeding, she uproots shoots of basil she planted just last week. She’s started forgetting little things.

  Tiny, white blossoms in a small, chinese vase, sky-blue. White-porcelain dragon clouds, with wings.

  Flowers of such delicacy. Six wide-flung petals, frail rosette upthrust on its calyx like a jewel on a tiny crown.

  For the longest time—the flowers seem to last forever in their vase—I can’t think what their faint scent reminds me of. High and powdery, like perfumed wax. Chilled cream, honey and paraffin. Marble.

  You.

  Dawn, fog. Sky the colour of time. This place is filled with ghosts! I live with one—no, five hundred. I look out into the time-swept streets and see still others—past or future? Streets filled with mists, miasmas, phantoms. Spectres of vanished instruments and books, and cruel instruments of iron and timber soon, now, to come.

  The ghosts of young men playing a ball game against the massive convent walls. And on those grey walls others sketching bright, crude symbols with strange cylindrical brushes. A few words I recognize: Crisis. PAN. México para los Mexicanos …

  San Jerónimo: the crumbling ghost of a ball court, an altar, an ancient book.

  Tremulous blue light in the rooms across the street.

  Mid-afternoon. Sun in a sky of brass. Thousand-throated roar of a bullring, five blocks away.

  Thread of hairshirt wool stuck in the bed of rough-planed timbers where she sleeps. Strand of hair caught in the scaly bark of a potted tree. Ragged fingernail recovered from the garden soil. Peeled whorls of fingertips, wedged invisible in a pocked column of volcanic rock abrasive like a file. Flesh wedded to a flail.

  With these, your textured leavings, I brew your returnings counter-spell.

  HARLEQUIN: CIVIL DISCOVERY

  WE WAITED FOR THE COURTROOM to clear. The scrum would be assembling for us outside. Hostile sound bite on the courthouse steps. Opposing counsel and the aggrieved father were the last to leave save us. Beulah’s mother, Grace, hadn’t come today. The third time in a week I’d seen Jonas Limosneros and the third thousand-dollar suit. Plastic surgery I could believe—but only with the greatest difficulty that this could be a great cardiovascular surgeon. Thick, wavy hair, lightly oiled. Coal black, with a few crimped strands of white. He was particularly dark-skinned for a Spaniard. The impeccably shaven shadow of a heavy beard. Dark eyes. A very handsome man. A worried man, much relieved. Or so it seemed to me. Theatrical pause before me to check his expensive watch. My chance to find his long-fingered hands artful. No rings. Maybe surgeons weren’t allowed, lest they leave them in their work. Our eyes locked. On the way past he took in my rumpled bleariness with a supercilious arch of the brow. Sick fuck.

  My lawyer turned his amused blue eyes on me. “There. That went well.”

  He seemed willing to include our manly exchange of glances in the generally favourable outcome of the day’s proceedings. “Now the rest will be just like I said. The main thing was giving the girl’s papers back. The clerk now hands them over to the police who, after a brief and muddled flip-through, return them to the family.”

  “For safekeeping.”

  “Look, I don’t like the father—”

  “Stepfather.”

  “Whatever—any more than you do. The thing was you turning over those papers.”

  I’d shown up at his office at closing time the night before with a cardboard box under my arm. Chris Relkoff, recommending him, had mentioned precendent-setting pro bono work and eclectic interests. Music and naval history, maybe. Fly-fishing. European jazz. I couldn’t help noticing that his assistant, typing slowly away that day in an orange summer dress, was prettier than strictly necessary. I had the notion she’d chosen the colour of the dress to match her boss’s thinning hair. Eclectic.

  “This mean you’re done playing cops and robbers?” he asked, eyeing the box.

  “So it would seem.”

  “Why the change of heart?” He poised his paunchy bulk at the edge of the typist’s desk and crossed his arms.

  “Think of it as me waiving my exclusive to the story.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I still want a copy.”

  Shaking his head, he waved me to the photocopier. “Knock yourself out.”

  On my first day in court it did not take long to understand what I was about to face. I’d left the cabin out in Cochrane two hours early, thinking to avoid the press. A courthouse of limestone and marble. Dun, four-columned porch. A few frieze-bound heroes robed and muscled. Inside, courtroom carpet the rich blue of open sea. A hush. Close enough to what I’d imagined. I was pleased to have come early. The judge now in session delighted me. Cranky lion—aging, preening despot in his den. I thought I matched up well against him.

  An hour later, my lion limped out to be replaced by Madame Justice Clements, an animal of a different stripe. Auburn hair, closely pinned in a tight bun. My contemporary. Nuanced, keen, the face of modern righteousness. The eyes of my community, without the blindfold.

  You have sinned against the colony. Ridiculous, a puritanical huddle. You have turned your back on the city. A palisade, a prairie fort, a pile of sticks. You have strayed beyond the pale, you are made a thing of scorn. I return yours richly multiplied. We speak with your father’s voice. This should be good, he barely used it. You have made his name a laughingstock—his clotted clan? They were one long before me. The rotten apple doesn’t fall so far after all. From the split and blasted tree. You’re one of us, we knew it all along. I’m not like you, I’m not like you at all. Up above us all like some kind of eagle. Now the chicken’s come home to roost. Chicken.

  We will see you broken and spiked out in the grass.

  What I saw in those first twenty seconds was still not what I’d done but what I faced. Prairie opprobrium—knowing, nodding, sage and gloating.

  Return her manuscripts? I would have done anything to escape the indignity of their contempt, their round-mouthed satisfaction. Run anywhere. Sold Beulah down the river a hundred times.

  I am not that breed of martyr.

  But I will answer them in my fashion. A fashion I have learned. Charges are brought, learned counsel is instructed. Show us what you’ve learned. Address the charges, the faceless mass of their derision.

  A higher court is now in session.

  Behind the departing heart surgeon and his lawyer the scrolled brass doors swung quietly to, the scent of sandalwood cologne wafting in the aisle. My lawyer put a hand out to restrain me as I made to get up from the table. “Let’s stalk.”

  “Don’t we have to leave?”

  “You in such a hurry to go out and meet your public?” He studied me for a moment.“I know it’s a nightmare. But I’m telli
ng you the worst is behind you. Do you sleep at all?”

  “Some nights are better.”

  “Well, sleep tonight. They’ve dropped the suit as promised. This civil action had me much more worried than anything the cops might have. You’ve done the right thing here.”

  I felt an urge to smile. But he was right. It would have been stupid to provoke the judge further. I had other charges of contempt to face.

  For days, the way out had been stupidly obvious, though I hadn’t seen it. Make copies. I was not thinking straight.

  “If we avoid mistakes,” he assured, “this whole thing goes away, like I told you.”

  “How?”

  “We’ve got a pretty solid police force. Experienced people are working your case. The more they turn up, the less attractive charging you becomes.”

  “Why?”

  “One, she left the sliding door open that night.”

  “For me.”

  “No idea. But no sign of forced entry. Plus, even if they could prove the papers in your possession were at her place that night—”

  “The neighbour saw me taking them.”

  “Taking what? Maybe it was your own box of papers, or a toaster oven. You’d brought it in with you. You see what I mean. Forensics now concurs the wounds were very likely self-inflicted. Meanwhile counselling to commit suicide is exceptionally difficult to prove—impossible here. Then there’s her psychiatric history …”

  “What about leaving the scene?”

  “Can’t be leaving the scene of a crime if no crime’s been proved. Or the scene of a police investigation, since the police weren’t on it yet. Arguably there’s something under the Good Samaritan laws, like breaking off a resuscitation. But no real proof you’d ever started first aid. She might’ve dressed those wounds herself, right?”

  He was watching me carefully now.

  “Of course you might’ve forced her to swallow all that stuff they pumped out of her guts….” When I didn’t take the bait he went on. “So you see why they’re reluctant. Obstructing a police investigation was probably their best shot. But you’ve just turned everything over to the judge—all of it, right?