Hunger's Brides (19 page)

I began the verse as a penance, but it came to me that this could be a prayer, as from a warrior on the eve of battle. He would have liked that.
But enough, Angelita, of all this shriving
. That's what he would have said. It is not such a crime to fail, though it is a sin if you cannot forgive yourself.

No, this was not the poem for him. I did not finish it. I should be drafting the lines that would win the poetry tourney—
a
joust
, Uncle Juan had said, in a bullring. And how proud Abuelo would be if I did, I would make his face so
wide
, and wipe away a little of my thoughtlessness. Uncle Juan was right. Abuelo would have so enjoyed the day: coaching me on strategy, assessing the challengers, reading the judges' sober miens. Such a game he would have made of it, to make me feel safe. We would be knights of old, vying heart and soul for a handkerchief.

Since gaps in this account will not be tolerated by those whose offices are holy, I cannot forestall his dying much longer. But not yet, not …
yet
.
We had a bullring to visit. And I had a battle to join, under the standard of El Dorado, and an old lion as my counsellor.

He had been there before.

I'd have my shield of learning, my shining corselet of wit, and for sheer grace and quickness in the ring I'd have my twin with me:
Amanda, Princess of the Cornflowers
.

And only she, only she would lift my veil.

I
had so wanted a spectacle.

To prepare for it, I let my mind turn to everything I had read about the sacrificing of bulls, bullocks, heifers, fatted calves, sea calves—oxen, bison even, and any and all contests against them. Herakles wrestling the white bull Phaëthon, forcing its mighty horns to the earth. And the white bull of Poseidon, father of the Minotaur—the Apis bulls of Memphis, the bull hunts of ancient Iberia—there was so much to know! I did know our Iberian bulls would rather die than run—even from armoured horses and knights keen for jousting. First lesson:
Die rather than run
. Well, maybe for the knight but surely not the bull. And which was I to be?

I saw how things would have to go. Down in the sand, pairs of combatants locked in mortal struggle. The last line of the contestant's poem rings out; all eyes turn to the Emperor. Thumb up, thumb down. The fanfares to rival Jericho, jugglers and jesters in the intermezzos. The day wears on, crowd favourites distinguish themselves—side bets, punters and touts. Fisticuffs in the aisles. The Maid battles on—quickness, grace, strategy, her arms …

The final pairing, the equal contest of noble adversaries—the bow, the curtsy—lord to lady, lady to lord. Acrostics and anagrams, reversible verses, triple echoes and
dobles entendidos
. Sonnet and gloss, eclogue and elegy, pyrotechnical panegyrics!

And then fireworks bursting across the sky like a thousand pomegranates launched by wild urchins—the booming of mortars now—for
there had been a tie
.

A tie.

Both are spared, both crowned—an unprecedented double laurel, and yet the bloodthirsty crowd
roars its approval down
. Then, soon, too soon … the lamentations at her early retirement from life in the ring. The encomiastic farewells, the tribute from her greatest adversary.

A quiet life, a lifelong friendship. People salute her in the street. She is allowed to walk in the street. She is walking with a friend.

She has a friend.

By the time the day came, I knew the tourney would not be as my imagination had painted it. Still, I told myself, it would be the most
interesting thing to happen to me in years. The only thing. I might as well have been in my room for four years. Born of a vestal. Raised by wolves.

It turned out the bullring was available only because the Archbishop decided bullfights were not to be held during the festival of Guadalupe this year. The lake was high. It was the end of the rainy season and she was supposed to be our island city's protectress against the Flood. The Archbishop may have thought she needed to concentrate.

It wasn't even a real bullring.

Well, it was real, but not permanent, not an arena like the Roman Coliseum, but a rickety assemblage of wooden bleachers and scaffolding that could be dismantled in sections and stacked, then remounted at a day's notice. The carpenters had honed this to a fine art—indeed, many also built theatrical sets.

The contest was not decided on the sand, in pairings and jousts. There were four hundred contestants, an unheard-of number. I had only to do the arithmetic. It would have taken days. The poems were not improvised on the spot, on some whimsy of the Viceroy's—a theme, a metre, a style. Instead, we'd had two weeks to prepare. Two weeks?—I could have filled a book. And the theme was no noble fancy but rather Our Lady of Guadalupe. Now
there
was a surprise. The whole city was obsessed with Guadalupe, Guadalupe….

But at least it was to be held in the Plaza del Volador. It was right next to the palace, but I didn't care so much about courtiers. No, I hoped I might see the Indian fliers who each day spun outwards on long ropes from a great whirling wheel five storeys in the air.

There
was
pageantry for our poetry joust. On the day of the city-wide invitation to contend in the tourney, we could hear the parade coming towards us, since ours was one of the few paved streets in our barrio. Sumptuous silver-trimmed carriages rumbled over the stones. There was even a sedan chair (I had never actually seen one) got up as Apollo's chariot, its sides emblazoned with gold and copper suns.

And such a dizzy cacophony! An intoxicate musical mob marched (out-of-step) drummed (off-beat) and intermittently blared (off-key)—effortless masters of this most intricate musical counterpoint. There were carriage bells and fifty church bells and a boys' choir. Up and down the block rose laughter and murmurs of wonder, exclamations and shouts of recognition as the menagerie passed: figures dressed head to foot as wild animals and unicorns and other fabulous beasts, spattered with mud to
the knees. And as though driving them from the realm, there followed on his white charger a knight in a full suit of plate burnished black and gold-chased. As he passed abreast of me in the doorway, a smudged and weary-looking woman knelt in the street. Her male companion brusquely pulled her up—
it isn't really real
. Her face wore a quizzical look as she puzzled over the paradox. And somehow she did not look quite so tired.

A phalanx of soldiers now, brandishing halberds behind a troupe of Indian dancers, forty or so.

They shushed.

All the dancers wore bracelets and anklets thick with countless little shells, and as each
danzante
swished and whirled and bounded, the sound rose two-score multiplied. Swiftly there mounted among us the susurrus of a wind that surges and gusts along the oaks on a windy night at the hacienda. And to remember this I felt a kind of hush falling in me.

On they went with crowns of turquoises and bobbing quetzal plumes, precious cloaks embroidered in hieroglyphs, and feather capes of quetzal and heron….

Next walked envoys of the religious orders and the Inquisition. A company of mummers and jesters scampered about with toy wands behind a knot of university scholars holding up True Learning's shining silver sceptres. Garish allegorical floats, and the indispensable dragon—
No hay procesión sin tarasca
.
†
Or that's what everybody said. This was my first one.

Then came the parade marshal, the bearer of so great a burden of dignity it bowed his legs. He carried the silver mace of his office, and on a staff of solid silver
THE PLACARD
. For Saturday, twelve o'clock noon, on the eighth day of December, in the year of Our Lord sixteen hundred and sixty-three, the Placard announced the grand theme …

As the marshal with the placard passed, it began lightly to rain, which served to remind us of the gravity of the theme. When the judging began two weeks later, a light rain was still falling. The Plaza del Volador seemed the sagest of choices now, since during the floods of 1629, it was one of only three plazas not to go under. Some of the lowest streets lay ankle-deep for five years thereafter. We all might hope Guadalupe was concentrating now.

I approached the plaza with Uncle Juan. We had to go the last four blocks on foot through streets so crowded as to be impassable by coach. I was peevish and glum, knowing this was not to be a real joust at all. But I was cheered to see a shop selling nothing but bullfighting gear, and the streets so festive. And there at the plaza entrance, beside the university gates and just above a little flight of steps, towered a massive bulletin:

I laughed outright. Some wit had scratched in an
n
to make
TOREO
into
TORnEO
. They wanted a real tourney too. Caution: poetry hazard.

The bullring looked impressively large. The plaza itself seemed more riot than festival. Hundreds of vendors had spread out their wares with no hint of order or pattern. Thousands, now, milled through a square littered with trampled fruit, pottery and crushed straw hats.

The only clear route was in the shadow of the palace walls, where the guards permitted no commerce. Uncle Juan took me firmly by the arm; there was a great deal of intimate jostling and more than one impertinently placed hand before we reached the wall. This was becoming a very adult affair. Well, it's a borrowed dress anyway, I thought, but this was bravado, for however adult my body might look from the outside, I did not feel entirely sure of myself in a plaza full of unwashed men.

Exotic tapestries had been hung from the palace balconies, and I noticed something curious: running from the corner of our plaza to the main square was a narrow street with nothing but barber stalls, with their lancets and leeches and bloodletting basins, their whetstones and razors, their brushes and soaps.

Then we were inside the bullring and there
was
blood in the sand.

It was thrilling and disconcerting. For an instant I wondered if it might turn out as I'd imagined after all.

But as we were seated on the platform with all the luminaries to await the Viceroy's arrival, we were treated to a farce. Anticipating His Excellency's Excellent Lateness, the tournament secretary had thought to provide us with the same sort of diversion that preceded the bullfights. It was that adventure of don Quixote in which the indomitable knight jousts with the furiously valiant Rinaldo for the legendary golden helmet of Mambrino. The great helm is, alas, a bronze barber's basin worn on a rainy day just such as this to preserve the hat of a barber not furiously valiant but today floridly fat. The barber's grey-dappled steed' was the most abject ass, infinitely worse than Sancho's, indeed of a class with the Knight of the Woeful Figure's own charger. Rozinante, the saddest
rozin
†
ever bestrid. And this gave me a quiet moment. This was a wound barely closed. And as the ancient Rozinante lurched about drunkenly under the weight of don Quixote, I remembered this was just the sort of horse expended nowadays on fighting bulls. There came then into my mind the most heart-sickening image of that old jade swung up on the curved horns of a bull the size of a windmill, and with all the wind's irresistible power unstrung and gutted and slung to the ground.

So when I was given, next, a chance to laugh I took it gratefully. Enter don Quixote's Lady Dulcinea, a hairy-chested serving wench played by a bearded dwarf. Even Uncle Juan had tears running from his eyes. And now came the mighty Rinaldo, unhorsed and japing about under his barber basin as the old knight tried to run him through with a lance. Sancho, the realist, who fancied he saw a barber and no fighting knight, was trying anxiously to restrain his master.

“Leave hold, Sancho—hugeous jolt-head—thou eternal disbeliever …”

Hugeous jolt-head … eternal disbeliever …

I had woken Grandfather during this very section. I wanted to protest the cruel treatment Cervantes had yet again served up to the old Quixote. Why didn't Cervantes just let him go home? After only a hundred pages don Quixote already had so many fine stories, and true friends to tell them to.

“Read again, Angelina. Maybe you were too angry with Cervantes. Not every windmill is a giant, I know. And what looks like a funny adventure sometimes isn't, it's true. But as we look back, the same may sometimes be said of a disaster. Tell me when you've found it, and come and read. It has been too long since I read this myself. Now let me sleep another minute or two….”

He didn't go back to sleep but, pretending to, watched me with a green squinty eye under the arm flung across his brow. So I found it, and nudged him. And as I read for him he lay back in the hammock and looked off into the west. Some while after I finished, he nodded and smiled. “There. Thank you, Angel—for do you know, I had forgotten the proverb, which is of course the very best part.”

I had not believed in the magic of this day, and had been only too ready to slide back into the gloom emanating from me as much as from that dark house. Unlike my great hero the nun-ensign, I had never even tried to free myself. I was the hugeous jolt-head. In that moment I felt Grandfather's presence for the second time, and the last—heard the husk of emotion in his voice, saw the big beaming face. And I was delighted to be in a crowd just like this, laughing till I cried like them.