“Casiopea, look at me,” a voice said.
“No,” she replied, her eyes closed tight.
She felt warm breath from human lips as he leaned down to speak into her ear. “It is me, Hun-Kamé,” he said.
She snapped her eyes open and looked up at him, and he looked down at her, slowly taking her left hand between his. The shadows grumbled and sighed around them; a couple of them spat on the floor. She could see the outlines of the room again and the wastebasket with the burning hair.
“We are famished!” they said. “We are hungry!”
“Oh, she nearly forgot herself,” wailed another.
“Quiet, you degenerate fiends, and attend me,” Hun-Kamé said, his voice cutting through their muttering like a blade. “Your eyes, on the ground, don’t you dare raise them again.”
The shadows hissed, and their blue-green glow grew narrow until they had no eyes. Blind they stood before both of them.
“Now, tell me what I need to know.”
The shadows spoke to one another in animated whispers, bowing their heads, as if conferring among themselves. Their tongues lolled out and in of their mouths. The matter decided, they spoke again.
“Head to Xtabay’s abode,” a shadow said. Perhaps the same one that had caught her eye before, perhaps another. Casiopea could not tell them apart.
“Where does she reside?”
“Nearby, see here,” the shadow said and a spark of fire, from the burning hair, lifted itself into the air and traced a line, a shape.
“My thanks,” Hun-Kamé said and tossed the last bits of hair to the shadows, which fell onto one another to devour them. And as they fell, blending, becoming one, the cold from the room ebbed, the darkness changed, and they were standing in the middle of a normal room, a tendril of smoke rising from the wastebasket, the bustling city again outside their window.
“I told you not to look at them,” Hun-Kamé said, letting go of her hand. He sounded grim, and she felt silly for the whole episode. First she’d wept, then she’d lost hold of him. And she’d been so scared, like a girl.
“I know,” she muttered.
The hair he’d tossed on the floor and the burnt hair in the wastebasket had vanished, but a sulfuric stench lingered in the room. He opened the windows to allow light and air in, and Casiopea was grateful for this gesture because the air inside was charged and stale.
Casiopea breathed in slowly. She felt supremely tired, her legs threatening to buckle beneath her. Her hand throbbed and she rubbed it, bending down at the same time, as if a heavy stone had been deposited on her shoulders. She straightened herself quickly enough, but he had noticed.
“I apologize thoroughly. This was taxing for you,” he said, and now he didn’t seem grim, just sober and measured.
“I…I’m not even sure…what were those things?” she asked.
“Ghosts.”
“I didn’t imagine ghosts were like that.”
Not that she had pictured ghosts as people wearing sheets, with two holes cut out for their eyes, or as wispy, floating apparitions. She hadn’t thought they’d be as frightening as they’d been. Nor that they might try to eat her.
“Certain ghosts. There are others, like those who haunt the roads and devour children, for one,” Hun-Kamé said with a shrug. “You should rest.”
“I’m not sure I want to nap,” she said, suddenly afraid of all the creatures that lurk in the dark and the shadows that might invade the room if she drew the curtains.
“And I assure you, you should. I do not say this idly. When I cast magic, I draw from your strength.”
She stared at him. “Like…”
“I feed off you. You know this.”
“Not like this, not—”
“Every minute of every hour, and when I use my magic, even more. Come, lie down,” he said, clasping her hand and drawing her toward the bed, then gesturing for her to sit.
Casiopea sat at the head of it, clutching a decorative pillow between her hands. She had wanted to see Mexico City, and when she did she had not expected she would be frightened by ghosts. Nor did she think she’d spend her first evening there asleep because a god had used her hair and her energy to conjure said ghosts. She’d imagined a nebulous sort of fun. But there was little fun to be had; even Carnival had not been enjoyed, merely observed from afar.
“It’s not right,” she said, frowning and toying with the pillow’s tassels. “It isn’t fair. I’m food for them or…or for you.”
“And who ever told you life was fair?”
“Maybe I thought it would be fairer with a god at my side.”
“That is rather naïve,” he said. “I’ll have to dissuade you about this. Who said this to you?”
He seemed so utterly serious—not cruel, just serious and concerned, as if he’d just discovered she didn’t know how to count to ten—about this matter that it made her chuckle.
“What amuses you?”
“Nothing. I suppose I might nap for a bit,” she told him, rather than explaining herself. She didn’t think he’d understand. “I guess you’ll want to sleep too.”
“I do not sleep.”
They had shared their quarters on the boat and the train, but she had not checked to see if he slept. He certainly lay on his berth. She had assumed he must rest too.
“But you said you slept in the chest, and Loray, he told me some gods sleep,” she said, remembering that detail.
“I also said it was not like your sleep, and as you can imagine, it was under extraordinary circumstances that I engaged in this activity.”
She considered this, nodding and placing the pillow back on the bed, behind her. “That means you don’t dream,” she said.
“Dreams are for mortals.”
“Why?”
“Because they must die.”
Somehow this made a perfect sort of sense. The volume of Aztec poetry she had read was full of lines about dreams and flowers, the futility of existence.
“That’s sad,” she said, finally.
“Death? It is unavoidable, not sad.”
“No, not death,” she said, shaking her head. “That you don’t dream.”
“Why would I need to dream? It means nothing. Those are but the tapestries of mortals, woven and unwoven each night on a rickety loom.”
“They can be beautiful.”
“As if there’s no other beauty to be had,” he said dismissively.
“There’s little of it, for some,” she replied.
She thought of the daily drudgery at Uukumil. Rise, get grandfather’s breakfast to his room, take the dishes back to the kitchen, sweep a floor or scrub it clean. Each evening a meal with her mother, each night a prayer to her guardian angel. Sundays at church, the clothes clinging to her skin, the day too hot. The secret time to peruse the pages of her father’s book. Her mother, brushing her hair and smoothing her worries. And again, this cycle.
“Is that why you stare at the stars?” he asked. “Are you searching for beauty or dreaming with your eyes wide open?”
“My father was an astronomy enthusiast. He knew the names of the stars and he’d point them out. I try not to forget them.”
She also tried to retain the sound of his voice when he told her legends before bedtime, but truth be told she’d forgotten. This made her sad, but she attempted to clutch the other remains of his memory even more tightly, holding with special reverence a book of poems by Francisco de Quevedo with pages falling out, like a withered daisy, which had rested by her father’s bedside when he passed away.
“My grandfather was so angry when he heard they’d called me Casiopea. Grandfather wanted a good Christian name, not some Mayan nonsense, and threatened to cut off contact with my mother if they went with that. Then they named me Casiopea. ‘It’s Greek nonsense, now,’ my fath
er said.”
She remembered the priest’s face when he’d heard she had no proper Christian name. He insisted on calling her María, and when that didn’t work, “the Leyva girl,” eliminating Tun. Now that she thought about it, that’s what most people called her, even though she had girl cousins, and any of them might have been “the Leyva girl.” There had been talk that some of those cousins ought to go to a boarding school, but Grandfather was old-fashioned and believed a woman’s place was at home, where she could focus on learning to be a proper wife. Martín had gone to a school when he’d been younger, but fed up with the rules and lessons there, he’d got himself expelled. Grandfather did not bother sending him back again.
“My grandfather didn’t appreciate the wittiness of the statement. He cut her off anyway. Then my father died and we had to go live in Uukumil,” she said. “Had I known you were trapped in that chest, I would have released you years ago, to spite him.”
“I would have been very grateful,” he replied. “As for those stars of yours and your dreams, I suppose they’ve kept you company, and there is no folly in them.”
She pressed a cheek against the bed’s padded headboard and glanced up at him. Her eyelids felt heavy but she didn’t want him to go yet, she wanted him to stay by the bed, looking down at her, his hands in his pockets, an eyebrow quirked.
“It’s odd to imagine the stars keeping someone company, as if they were ladies in waiting,” she said, unable to suppress a yawn despite her best effort.
“I certainly wouldn’t pick stars as my attendants, but then I am not mortal.”
“What attendants do you have?” she asked.
“What kind of attendants do you picture?”
Casiopea imagined skeletons and bats and owls—all manner of creatures that haunt the night, since those were the elements that embroidered the tales of the realm of Xibalba.
“Frightful ones,” she said tentatively. “Am I wrong?”
“Dead ladies, noblemen, and priests who bought passage into my kingdom centuries ago, attired in their finery.”
He smiled, as if recalling his throne room and his courtiers, and although she truly did not wish to gaze upon this world of his, she smiled too, because the memory of Xibalba brought him joy. He looked at her, then, and noticing her exhaustion—or another detail that gave him pause—he set a hand against his chest and dipped his head politely.
“I’ll let you sleep,” he said.
She nodded, placed her head against the very white pillows, not even bothering to get under the covers.
She heard his footsteps as he moved away, and then they stopped.
“Rest assured, your vanity can remain safe,” he told her.
Casiopea lifted her head and frowned. He was by the connecting door, looking down at the floor, as if in deep thought. She wasn’t sure she hadn’t imagined the words, since he wasn’t looking at her.
“I’m sorry?”
“You were worried about the hair. You said it was the only becoming feature you possess,” Hun-Kamé said.
“It doesn’t matter. A hat—”
“It’s not the only one,” he said.
It was a simple utterance, which she might have accepted graciously had his gaze not fixed on her with an austere sincerity that made her panic and gape at him like a damn fool.
“Thank you?” she mumbled at last.
He closed the adjoining door and Casiopea stared at it for a long time, the sleep that had been courting her having vanished. She wondered what those becoming traits were. He’d said once before that she was pretty, but she hadn’t quite believed him. He was merely being kind, she told herself. But even if he was, it was both nice and odd to experience such chivalry.
They ordered room service, which Casiopea had never done before, but the hotel clerk had mentioned it when they checked in, so she’d gone downstairs to inquire how this service might be obtained. They probably thought her a country bumpkin, asking such a thing, but Casiopea had never been reluctant to learn.
There were a myriad of food options, but she opted for bread rolls and marmalade, knowing little of what one was supposed to purchase in such a place, plus hot coffee. Shortly thereafter a hotel employee knocked at her door, wheeling in a cart and depositing two dishes on the table.
Hun-Kamé and Casiopea discussed their schedule for the day, eating by the open window. Hun-Kamé wanted to go to a jewelry store, which Casiopea thought odd.
“What would you need from there?” she asked, dipping the bolillo in her coffee.
“A necklace, very likely. If we are to see Xtabay tonight we cannot head there empty-handed.”
“I thought gods did not make any offerings.”
“It’s not an offering, it’s a gesture of goodwill. Besides, I won’t be carrying it, you will,” he said airily.
Casiopea pointed at him with the butter knife. “You consider me your maid.”
“My ally, dear lady,” he replied, sipping his coffee slowly, as if he was still reluctant to taste earthly dishes.
She frowned, picking at the center of the bolillo, extracting the soft bread from the harder shell. She didn’t have the luxury of eating the soft part of the bolillo back home, having to munch whatever was available under the watchful eye of her mother. Now she could do as she pleased, and she rolled bits of soft bread, tossing them into her mouth.
“You could spin a few jewels out of rocks,” she said.
“I can’t do that.”
“I’ve seen you turn stones into coins,” she reminded him.
“I cannot alter the nature of an object. It is merely a play of light and shadow, an illusion.”
“Will the illusion wear off?”
“Illusions always wear off.”
They asked the concierge about jewelry shops. There were suitable shops all down Madero—stubborn capitalinos still referred to it as Plateros, unwilling to accept the name change that honored a murdered president—but he emphasized La Esmeralda, which had been the darling of the Porfirian aristocracy. La Esmeralda was looted in 1914 by Carranza’s troops, but that seemed like a lifetime ago. It had been renovated seven years before, grew more splendorous, and advertised itself as a place for “art objects and timepieces,” selling all sorts of wildly expensive baubles.
The store was grand, but like many newer buildings in Mexico it was also a mishmash of styles, French rococo mixing with neoclassic, a little vulgar if one looked at it closely. Most capitalinos did not realize that the architectonic pretensions of the building were more nouveau riche than Art Nouveau, and, had this been explained to them, they would have denied the building had any deficiencies.
The store’s name was boldly emblazoned across the front, a clock marking the hour above it. Before its iron skeleton was erected a more modest three-story building had stood there, made of red tezontle, best suited for the soft Mexico City soil that had been, after all, a city of canals before the Spaniards filled up its waterways. But then Hauser and Zivy had that old house smashed and established the Esmeralda in its place, a store in which the distinguished consumer could order Baccarat crystal and elaborate music boxes. Inside, the building was all marble, glass, and dark wood, gleaming crystal and profuse decorations.
Hun-Kamé knew what he wanted, focusing on gold necklaces. Casiopea, meanwhile, looked at a heavy silver bracelet with black enamel triangles, of the “Aztec” style, which was much in vogue and meant to attract the eye of tourists with its faux pre-Hispanic motifs. It was a new concoction, of the kind that abound in a Mexico happy to invent traditions for mass consumption, eager to forge an identity after the fires of the revolution—but it was pretty.
“You should try it on,” said the saleswoman, smelling a commission.
“I couldn’t,” Casiopea said.
“I’m sure your husband will think it pretty.”
“He is not my husband,” she replied.
The saleswoman gave her a funny look, and Casiopea realized she must think she was Hun-Kamé’s mistress. How embarrassing!
Casiopea tugged at her hair, self-conscious. She had informed Hun-Kamé she’d have to go to a hairdresser that same day, since her work with the scissors had been poor. She’d look like a flapper now and they’d think her a loose girl. The saleswoman probably judged her a tart already.
It was very important not to be a tart. But she was already wearing skirts that showed her legs. What were the other requirements for such a designation? Did it matter if she wasn’t one but merely looked the part?
“If you like it, you should take a closer look at it,” Hun-Kamé said, hovering next to her.
“It’s expensive.”
“I already bought an expensive necklace, a bracelet is no concern.”
She tried it on and then he asked. “Would you like it?”
“Truly?” she replied.
“If you wish it,” he said, signaling to the saleswoman, who took the bracelet and began to place tissue paper in a box.
“If I wore it in Uukumil they’d say it’s gaudy and the priest would chide me.”
“You’re not in Uukumil.”
Casiopea smiled at him. The saleswoman placed the lid on the box and she gave Casiopea a curious look. She was probably confused, trying to determine if Casiopea was a mistress already or a would-be one, meant to be seduced with nice jewelry.
“Thank you,” Casiopea said when they left the store. “I’ve never owned anything of value and nothing this pretty.”
In the middle of the street a policeman was directing traffic, looking bored, while she looked nervously at the semaphore and the multitudes around them, trying to determine at which point it was safe to cross the street. She eyed the streetcars fearfully and the automobiles in wonder, and someone behind shoved her aside, eager to get to the other side of the street. She was confused by the city and its incessant activity, but also happy and grateful for Hun-Kamé’s company. She thought of him as her friend.
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