Hunger's Brides (11 page)

It was terrifying, and beautiful, like Aeschylus. This was the song for the newborn boy. The midwife first removes the cord. She takes the afterbirth and buries it in the earth in a corner of the house. She lays the cord out to dry in the sun. Later, if the boy is a warrior, he will carry it with him onto the field of battle. And if he falls it will be buried there.

I asked her the song for a girl. But Xochitl had said Amanda was not yet ready to learn it.

Amanda gave more, but that wasn't why I began to feel guilty. Jealousy I'd felt before. Of losing what I had. I'd felt it sometimes when Isabel would call Grandfather away from me for some reason. But this was new, this was envy…. The things Amanda could share with me seemed so much finer than mine—even
poetry
now. The only other thing I had left to offer was teaching Amanda to read. But books were
hard
—she had better understand that. Harder still was reading aloud before an auditor so very stern of late. I had been making her read Plutarch. Plutarch is a Greek who wrote a lot about Greece, which I had been trying so very patiently to teach her about. Plutarch is hard, even in Castilian. (And I was in no mood now to tell her how much trouble
he
had had learning to read Latin.)

There was a passage she kept stumbling over, right at the bottom of the page. Over and over, trying harder and harder to please me, her eyes almost as round and wide, for once, as mine. “No, don't look at me—
read
—no, you're trying too hard.” She was almost
nine
. I was so frustrated because something delightful awaited, if only we could reach the top of the very next page. I had made a crown for her to wear, to mark the end of this difficult and profound and beautiful passage. And the crown was a very grand gesture—a wizardly conjury of my own, if she would only, please,
get there
.

“I
know
the names are Greek, but if you can't say ‘Boeotia,'
†
how are we ever to read Hesiod?” It was as though she didn't even understand anymore what was coming out of her mouth.
Did
she?

“Nympheutria
—
anakalypteria
¹⁶
—tell me, Amanda: which is the bride's attendant, which is the unveiling gift?”

Would
I
have known, had I not just read it myself the night before? Well, today was not the day, either, for telling her I had no Greek at all.

“No, Amanda.
Nympheutria!
That's what they'd call
you
, if
I
were getting married. The unveiling thing is the—oh never mind, the
other
one.”

Amanda cried easily. Silently, no sobs. Her neat head bent; then her eyes just gushed. She was quick to tears of tenderness, quick to tears of pity, or love—watching them netted one day like bright fish in her soft black hair was a moment of fascination. But she would never,
ever
be made to cry by something like this.

Over her face had fallen a mask of cold wood. How square the chin, how pale the lips, how very hard the wood.

It was the first day in two years I walked home alone.

As I approached the house, I saw two horsemen down by the paddocks and between them a long-horned black bull. It was almost as tall as the horses themselves and chafing at the tight tethers—two ropes bound to each rider's pommel. Isabel was sitting on the top rail of the corral and Abuelo had forgone his nap to stand with her and watch. The bull had been brought from Chimalhuacan. “Is he ours now?” I asked.

Isabel surprised me by answering first. “No, only for a week or two.”

The bulls I'd seen were sullen, sluggish things. Freed of its tethers, this one moved swiftly around the corral, then stopped to hook one of its horns—lightly, now left, now right—against an upright, as if to test the firmness of its anchor. The older horseman glanced at Isabel then. The younger one had been stealing glances at her for a while. After a minute she climbed down and called to one of the workers to bring poles for braces.

Abuelo had held his silence until now. “This one,” he told me proudly, first glancing at his daughter, “would be worthy of the finest corridas of Spain, not these butcheries here. True, the calves will be a little wild….”

Just before dawn I awoke—and
there she was
, as always. But now Amanda waved over me a large white square of fine muslin, the sort Xochitl used for squeezing water from curd.

“Is this a truce?” Friends such as I did not deserve peace offerings.

“No, Ixpetz—I thought
you
would guess. Mother didn't know either. Look—
now
see? It's a
veil.”

Yes, Amanda, I saw. I did see at last
.

We slipped out through the kitchen without even waiting for Xochitl to put food in our satchels.

On our way out to the fields, we went by the corral. Seeing us, the new arrival began to cut powerfully, quickly, back and forth across the
enclosure. The bull still looked as if it could come right through the braced fence—or even over—if it saw something it wanted.

Amanda had already started towards our reading place. She hesitated, seemed about to say something, but then quietly came with me. As we picked flowers, she told me a little more of what she'd learned about midwifery from Xochitl. As the morning wore on, she grew more distracted. Soon it would be time to go in for lunch. She led me back to the shady spot past the cornfield. We sat. She was quiet, her eyes downcast. We sat. She looked up at me. Finally she said, “Have you given up?”

What an idiot I was—of course that's what she would think. I dug Plutarch out from under all that day's flowers and the wilted ones farther down. She must have seen my relief. She read, and for the first time in a while I was not stern at all. And she read
beautifully
, the whole of the lovely passage I had marked, which ends

“The veil!” she said, delighted. “Wait …” She started digging in her own satchel for the muslin. “Wait, wait, I'll be your
attendant
, your …
Nympheutria!
Was that right?” She had closed her eyes to concentrate and opening them, looked up, the question in her eyes.

But as she opened them she saw that I, for once, had been the quicker. The crown was in my hands. It did look strange, I supposed. We didn't have asparagus, so I had taken agave spikes, cut them into long triangles and woven them into a slim crown. It was the best I could do. I had wanted
nopal
.
†

She looked at it a long while. “It's for you,” I said. She nodded. She had understood all right. “Let me
be your
attendant for once, NibbleTooth.”

And I was. We plaited her hair. She wore a muslin veil, and an almost-asparagus crown. And I thought the bride, at her unveiling, very beautiful.

As I turned her around and pulled back her veil, her big almond eyes were full and danced like the light in a birdbath.

We missed lunch. As the bell tolled on, we chattered like
urracas
about crowns. “In Greece this could have been a laurel crown, for great feats of letters. You can read now, Amanda, really
read
. Plutarch is hard—but good, no?” The Greeks used crowns for everything. The crown of obsidion for generals raising sieges. “And no Greek woman not
a virgin would be caught dead without her headpiece, also a kind of crown, like this—”

With my hands I showed her how it was—like a plane of holiness settled over the brow. Was it not like a rising into loveliness? Not quite an ascent into the sky but a surfacing …

“And the most beautiful thing—when the nuns in Mexico City take their vows, do you know they wear tall crowns of wildflowers? Wedding crowns like the asparagus—but for marrying
Christ.”

“Cinteotl?” she said, wide-eyed.

“Maybe, maybe not.” I said, mysterious. “But listen to
this
, when a nun dies, she's buried wearing the same crown she wore as a girl, NibbleTooth, as a bride. Isn't that lovely? Of course, the flowers would be a bit dry….”

And as though the day were indeed blessed, Isabel had been busy with the cattle and had missed lunch herself.

The next morning at dawn, Amanda woke me wordlessly, an index finger to my lips. She led me out by the hand in my nightgown. It was a cold spring morning in the mountains. We weren't even dressed—we could see our breath. She was leading me towards the corral. A little nervously my eyes sought out the bull in the chill half light. I wanted to be sure it hadn't come through the fence. “Amanda …” I said, half complaining and chilly, in my bare feet. But Amanda wasn't looking at the bull, was almost casually looking
away
from him. Then I saw. My heart stopped.

The bull stood stock-still in the centre of the corral. Silent, solid, puffing gouts of steam, like the mountain itself. It shook its head now, wreathed in smoke, and glared at us with its small black eyes as through a green-wood fire. And around its horns was wound, in a long figure eight, a

dark

  blue

    cornflower

        crown.

Green had been the colour of my envy that spring. Dark blue, the shade of its leaving.

My princess of the corn. She spoke to me in dance, in her love of swiftness, in the laughter she was so quick to cover with her hands. In the way the mask of all her wariness dropped away as she taught me a step.

We ran into the fields that day, and I could almost keep up with her. She stopped and waited for me. As always.

It was the next day that Xochitl told us about the special place.

How indignant we were. How could she have waited almost three years to tell us of it?

“Because you are almost women now.” Xochitl smiled, her eyes a tilt of triangles. How easily we were mollified. But then perhaps she also knew how close Amanda truly was. Xochitl had waited “because the earth up there is jade. And because there are certain dangers….”

I had come to think the word
danger
much abused by adults. There were, for example, the wild animals Isabel had once hinted that my sisters wrestled each day just beyond the portals in Nepantla. In the opposite sense, Abuelo was known to backtrack if he felt that his true tales of dangerous bandits or werewolves had brought them too vividly near our firepit. But this was not Xochitl's way, not the way among women. The special place was safe, but there were precautions to take along the path.