Hunger's Brides (150 page)

We talk quietly for a moment or two. She seems tired. There is not much fight left in those hazel eyes. But as she turns to go she looks at my hands and asks if I am starting a new collection. Her face is drawn, the faint white scar from eye to mouth more noticeable. She does not wait to hear my answer.

Good-night, Antonia.

Through the room moves the scent of flowers from the trees by the fountain and the smell of horses from the corrals to the south. I look out over the Merced canal, low now, a solitary canoe slipping under the Monzón bridge, rippling the quarter moon. The dry season is ending. With a little rain, but not too much—one hesitates to ask—and cooler days, the smell rising from the canal will not be so bad. There is a young family on the upper floor of the old house across the street. I think they have just moved here too. I will have to ask one of the sisters on this side. The flower market below is interesting to watch. Funerals, festivals, young lovers. The time, long or short, will pass quickly enough.

With the idle hands that are a source of such anxiety here and new hope to Antonia, I have fashioned from common garden clay a puzzle much as I made once as a girl. The puzzle offers a test of dexterity. The object is to roll a small clay ball, against its natural inclination to fall, up the spiral. A simple spiral tower in miniature, modelled on a diagram of such a puzzle from the territory of Persia. I believe, somewhere in that
land I shall not see, one may make a pilgrimage to climb the spiral ramps of temples following this design. Nothing is easier to build, nothing is harder to climb. I climb it now.

Such rousing contortions—such hip sways, such elbow fluxions and wrist rolls. Then as now, just such were mine, that day in the shady spot by the granite cross in Panoayan, as I gave myself over to the puzzles that cannot be solved—or if they can, not with hand and eye but heart and soul. Where I tried so hard not to choose by choosing … everything.

Then, failing, I had thought to put all such childish notions out of my mind. Now it seems incredible that I thought it all behind me. The riddles and puzzles, the alphabets and anagrams, the forms hidden in the land, the house divided against itself, the wars of the past. The lost ages of Man. And I would not have liked to think—no, not at all—that the destiny I had always looked forward to could be woven merely of these, of such emblems and patterns and habits of mind. Just behind me.

Refuse or recant, erasure or silence. Consider well, choose carefully. Perhaps one begins to answer by wondering if it's been a mistake to think such puzzles only childish things and by asking if the Persians were so very different, and if their spiral temples were only for children.

Down by the river Panoya, windmill blades turn sleepily like pinwheels on a breeze. The shadow of a cedar branch nods over the arm of a granite cross. The sun's warmth lays a soft sash across my back. Over at the water troughs, the driver stirs, wakes from his nap under the ox cart. A cluster of fresh-picked wildflowers leans against the cross beside me. Beyond it, I notice a clump of weeds, freshly pulled up. The long mound of earth is pocked, subsided in places like bread left out in the rain, like an old hut covered in sod. A green rabbit satchel lies at my knees, its contents spread out among the cones and dried needles before me.

I take up an old book. With a forefinger I bend the corner of a page. It arches like a cat stretching after a nap, trembles in the slight breeze and tugs at me, a sail eager to be launched. At the outer edge of the maguey field a movement catches my eye, my mother's chestnut mare spinning out trains of dust behind her.

I no longer believe it is fate that brings us to meet here, or not fate in the way I had once understood it, but it is a moment of decision. For Amanda and me it may already have been too late: the nun-ensign did not always triumph. And in spite of everything that went wrong between us, everything we needed to know had been there all along. Amanda and
I were
cuates, cuates
were enough.
⁴⁰
Nor is it any longer so clear that the destiny I chased was so unlike the fate I did too little to help her escape.

Perhaps the two things are only the same—one we see in looking ahead, with hope, the other in looking back.

I feel a kind of peace, letting my eyes wend and stumble in the way of bees over a field of wildflowers—bumbling comets trailing pollen—who in their windings weave a fine canopy of yellow muslin against the sun. The weight in my lap is a comfort. The book, mildewed and waterlogged, opens to where it always does. And yet now I read in the shapes arrayed about me that the keepsakes were not precisely evidence, or not only that—not proof that I had not forsaken the past. Not evidence against a charge, but charms in a magic against loss itself.

And for this, for us, it is still not too late. Mother passes quite near, riding hard. Her hair and the horse's long tail run together on the wind gusts, like rain driven through a fountain. The ox cart rattles and groans along the side of the house.

What has changed is not so much the evidence but that I let myself remember it. I have heard her sing to Diego's baby. I know this voice, and that it is not only Xochitl who has sung for me in the night.
My father's granddaughters …
I have heard this, too, such an odd way of putting things. I have the fresh flowers at my side, the fresh-picked weeds. It was my mother who chose this spot for him because I could not bear to choose. Even angry and hurt I knew she had chosen perfectly. If there has been a piece of evidence still lacking, it is perhaps knowing a little more of how a woman can need a man, and the need to be fearless to make another proud. And now I have my letter back from Uncle Juan. The swarm of thoughts, the memories that have returned me here, even as they had once driven me down from Ixayac, ease … Past the sentry box the spokes falter and at the grassy stream, almost stop. The driver snaps the traces twice down hard on the oxen's backs. The Inquisition cortège waits for it to cross. The wagon staggers on, makes its laggard way over the bridge. No, for this, it is not too late. And for us, that moment is now.

I gather up my things. I get to my feet.

I go into the house … to discover some small part of what my mother knew of love.

Brother Francisco Manuel de Cuadros came to the locutory only once, a few months before his arrest. Carlos had given me some warning of what
to expect. They had not seen each other for almost five years. He was small even next to Carlos as they came in, Carlos in black, he in his faded brown cassock, ragged with the quantity of its mendings and his poverty. Fine sandy hair, what little hair he had, scorched white at the tips, his skin mottled by the sun. The impression that has lingered was of sand—the hair, the skin, the cassock lightened by the elements. Carlos had been shocked by the change in him. I remember his quiet, the slight tremor in his hands. But perhaps Carlos meant the eyes, a colour one would have said once blue, as of an unclouded sky whitened ahead of a dust storm or fire. Or this is how I remember them now.

He and his fellow Franciscans had been two years among the Maya, earning their trust before being allowed to meet the priests of Votan. “It was an archive,” he said quietly. “Thousands and thousands of manuscripts. Like those we know here, but more detailed, more intricate, as if the work of great painters, but these were painting canvasses of text. Speaking figures….” It took two more years to learn the basis of reading them.“It felt like watching not just all of a literature but all of an art burn at once.”

His whitened eyes in the mottled face had a staring quality even when averted. The painted books piled in the square in Valladolid had been like a small mountain, a pyramid. He had broken faith with his order and hidden a hundred, for what use was the science of reading them if there were no books to practise it upon. But choosing them had proven worse than watching them burn.

After the Franciscan's death, and when it seemed at last safe for Carlos to make his way back to the city, he and I vowed to each other that should any of those manuscripts ever come into our hands we would defend them with our lives. It was twenty years ago. We were younger. It was an emotional time.

During most of that visit Fray de Cuadros had kept his eyes just slightly down, as if something moved on the floor behind me. I am accustomed to such things in one form or other. They all perhaps learn this at seminary. But I was sure then it was neither in fear nor in distaste, as I like now to think it was not in shame. It seems to me tonight that simply because Manuel de Cuadros expressed contrition as the smoke was rising to his eyes, this does not mean, after all, that he did not keep to some secret decision or pledge. I cannot know what it was, but I like to imagine that for him too there was a place that had inspired it. A place
from his youth, or somewhere in the mountains of the south, a waterfall, a village of faces, a text on the wall of a ruin.

But a resolution made in strength and not against himself.

There are two small crosses now at the base of the cedar tree. The cross of granite I have seen, the one of obsidian I have only pictured there. Even five years ago, though I had a bishop's dispensation to go, I did not see why I should, with everything I had loved there gone. The site I chose because she chose it for him. And because it is the place I would choose also for myself. It is a place where with every step you take, you walk in halls of jade.

But the stone—this I chose for her. A stone that is also a glass. It is one of an uncommon beauty, native to our region. We do not always get good-bye.

Among the last of the shades to come to the bowls was Achilles. There, Odysseus began to sing his praises, of his fame among the living and the glorious fashion of his death, but Achilles silenced him, with this: It were better to serve as slave to the poorest of the Living than rule as king among the Dead.
Recant
. And yet, as I turn this puzzle in my hands, I wonder if I have returned to relinquish a notion that I have too long held, or just perhaps, to detect the fable in theirs.

At the margins of the living world there is a secret spring, the origin of all things, and some have called it Oceanus. And Oceanus … the ocean river that forms the outermost rim of Achilles' shield, flows in reverse. One does not look back leaving Hell. But being there, one looks back if one ever hopes to emerge.

And among all the living, the one Achilles looked to was Odysseus, for news of his son.

Erasure or silence, defiance or submission. There are puzzles to which the hardest answers last, the earliest endure. At Xochitl's knee I had once learned that Time itself could be looked upon as a spiral. Hold it up, turn it in the hand. Time as a spiral, memory as a cutting plane: the truths it reveals follow from where and how one begins. Roll the ball up the spiral again: the sum of all possible angles is as true as a fable, but the One Truth in the sum is not for the reckoning of Man. Much is lost upon us, a few things remain. Remember these—with pleasure, remember again … my mother firing off an arquebus during a jaguar attack in the dead of night … the angels in
the library. And there was a moment after a dinner, when together we almost laughed.