Hunger's Brides (146 page)

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 Xochitl, 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 terrible 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.