Hunger's Brides (122 page)

This was all I had wanted to say to my friend, as Christina had once written to hers about the hearts of men, and wars and ending them. One does not remake the world from first principles, but neither do we truly see it by observing each thing separately, as if from nowhere. We are not
nowhere, we are in Mexico. We are not separate, we are here together for an hour. And though each eclipse might be tracked through infinite pasts and into infinite futures, this one hour will only happen this way once. In everything we feel and see and know lies this more ancient wisdom. The dying of the Sun, in all its terrible beauty and glory, comes only once, for us.

I
n the weeks after the eclipse the rains returned to the city, hard, unrelenting, while against the mountains broke thunder and black storms it was said one could not breathe through, save with a hand cupped against the face—rain plunging not in drops but unbroken sheets as from upended cauldrons, and much hail that laid waste the fields, flattened grain and the tall corn, stripped orchards and the long plots of beans, scattered flocks, killing many lambs outright and even calves in the upper pastures. Flash floods such as had never been seen rolled down the bare mountainsides, and from the volcanoes as down the sides of a field tent, gathering mud and rock over slopes stripped of trees, sweeping the soil itself now from whole fields, flooding the watercourses with high walls of water. Behind these, slurries of mud, tree trunks and boulders rasped out the arroyos. Bridges, roads, whole farms were carried off, churches and monasteries broken apart and sloughed into the pleasant draws they had overlooked. How fragile a building of stone, once the foundations are made to shift. So it was that in the next weeks and months, the provisions that might have come from the surrounding hills to the valley flooded and blighted and infested with weevils did not come, or came so meagrely as to nourish old grievances and ever kindle the rumours of hoarding, through autumn and into the first months of 1692.

Increasingly did the valley of Anahuac depend on cities farther afield. Pack trains and heavy wagons heaved and plodded over muddy tracks and mountain passes from Puebla and Oaxaca, Queretaro and Guadalajara. Many mules and burros and draft horses died. Beasts of burden grew scarce, with ever more needed to haul ever smaller cargoes over roads steadily nearing disintegration. Even within sight of the city the wagonmasters and muleteers were unsure of delivering their cargoes. The roads approaching the causeways now were fields of mud where thousands of Indians toiled. In heavy rain the men deepened the ditches,
dug drainage channels in the sloughs that were once fields, sectioned small tree trunks and laid these cross-wise in the roadstead, and over this laid gallet and gravel from the lakeshore.

Sections of the new causeways built in the last century subsided, weakened by the constant rain. Covered ever more deeply in mud, they clogged with the slower traffic even as the shipments dwindled in size. As the pack trains and wagons queued to cross, cargoes of vegetables mouldered in the damp. Ripe fruit rotted. Disputes arose. The shippers and wagoners demanded compensation. Fewer were willing to risk the journey. Contracts were rewritten to make the delivery point the lakeshore not the city. Whence the cargoes had to be transhipped, onto beasts of burden supplied by the city administration. Food, coal and firewood were reloaded in smaller bundles into lighter carriages, into enormous corn baskets to be ferried across the causeways by Indians on foot and into any available canoes.

The Indians were no longer needed to dredge the city's canals. Now they laboured from first light to dark building dikes. The lakeshore encroached; the canals overflowed their channels and spilled through the streets, a few passable now by canoe. The Merced canal along the west wall of San Jerónimo had overflowed, and could be distinguished from the streets on each bank by deeper tones of red and black. Black with the usual filth and sewage, red with the mud of foundered adobe houses and blood from the slaughterhouses where the livestock sickened from the damp and hunger and rotting feed. At the first sign of infirmity they were slaughtered, eventually in the corrals themselves.

Then the bakers and
tortilleros
began to close—one day no wheat, the next no corn, on other days grain but no fuel.

By March there was hardship enough for all. The greatest markets in the world were humbled. The grain was wet in the garners. The lack of bread was hard for everyone, but the want of corn—for tortillas, gorditas, tamales,
pozole
—was especially cruel for the poorest, for the mothers, for those of an age to be warriors, for those old enough to remember. This had once been a people of the corn. The new corn was a child in its crib, the young corn a warrior, the hard corn a blade of sacrifice, and this sacrifice the shucking of a heart.

The mud dikes, while not easy to maintain, were at least not as hard to build as they might have been, for as the houses of the poorest foundered, the adobe slumped into the streets. The rivers in the road
beds and alleys ran with little sticks of poor furniture, bits of cloth and rag, baskets.

Many died.

By April, what was once the best growing season was drawing to an end. It had been raining for almost two years. In the convents the cellars lay under water to the ceilings, the kitchens ankle-deep, the provisions piled now on the floors of sitting rooms and in bedrooms on the upper storey. We subsisted nervously, guiltily, on stores of rich conserves, jams and sweets, on the rare piece of fruit coaxed from the orchards. The young children in the convent school no longer chose blue for the sky but shades of grey, blue-black, purple and brown. Books on the shelves mouldered and mildewed, the pages warped and swelled, the boards bent, the bindings split, packing the volumes more tightly, making them harder now to take down, often not to be returned to the same shelf.

Books, letters … were we never to attempt poetry on human affliction, how much space would be left vacant on our shelves. The Old Testament reduced to a few spare passages read in the pleasant gleanings of an hour, Sophocles and Aeschylus to be dispensed with entirely. Thucydides and Herodotus thinned to a recitation of places and dates. Much of Hesiod—and all that was fine in
Works and Days
.

On the sufferings of animals we make no literature; except we give it a purpose, their agony bears within it nothing of the redemptive. It is not tragic, it is obscene. But on a human suffering, neither may we make free to spout just any sort of poetry. It is one matter to take from Music a perfected idea of Time, and to make thereby of History a musical science, but it would be better to say why this should be so—though we cried out for answers, we might still find consolation in detecting some machinery of redemption, the mechanism of a purpose, though these remain ever fugitive, ever mysterious.

This. That a people, to the extent that it is a people or becomes one through just measures of joy and pain, might be considered possessed of a soul. A simple soul, instilled with an ancient learning, instructed in a Music old and simple and terrible, in the beauties of eclipses and the earth itself rending, in the detonations of lightning and of mountains that erupt.

And so perhaps needing to find some purpose, we might speak of a nation entering a night of trial. Of this dark night we are told by its poet that if the child-soul of a people is to be instructed it must first be
weaned of the pleasures of the senses and all delectable things. Though the soul is being fed manna, the tongue does not taste it. For the flavour is delicate after the flesh-pots. In their hunger and their want the people of our valley dreamed of different things, some of meat, some of mangoes, pomegranates, some of good fresh bread.

In a person or likewise in a city, one cannot properly speak of constant panic—panic either subsides or else ends in destruction, self-destruction or madness. To see a beggar on a street corner or in a market, a starveling in rags muttering in singsong and telling stories to himself, it is lunacy we first think of. During those days, in the ceaseless repetition and mutation of our rumours we had become in this sense one lunatic; they were as if the rumours and singsong of one mind. There was anguish and hunger, moments of panic, and the rumours were our delirium.

The blight worsened. The
chahuixtle
spread like locusts, though people from the city were not sure how these creatures moved—if they crawled or flew. It was said that a farmer would look over a fine field at sunset and wake to its devastation, that the infestation travelled now as a swift horse galloping. A deeper fear was disease, that the sicknesses that had attended upon the Conquest, and so greatly abetted it, would be returned now as our harvest. Cholera, and typhus, and the most feared, for its hideousness, was the small pox. Disease did come—not from the country but from the barrios nearest the slaughterhouses to the north of San Jerónimo, and the feedlots to the south. The cattle especially were frail, and their handlers and slaughterers seemed most afflicted by these new fevers and died quickly. Many prayers at our convent were said for the dead.

And still the rains. Even in our prosperity, we could not get dry in the cells and workrooms of the convent. Leaks in ceilings, along window ledges, water standing on the ground, mildew high on the walls. Even in the shelter of the colonnades clothing never dried on the lines. If it were raining during confession, one might be wet from one Friday to the next.

The waters rose until long spans of the causeway decks went under. It had been hard to imagine, was hard still to believe. The causeways were a mighty thing, the city's pride, leagues long, and straight and high. So wide as to let six carriages pass abreast. The water was wider. Those few who imagined they might find a haven on the sea of mud that had been the mainland waded out over the long causeways with what belongings they could shoulder. Then the raised borders went under and the water on the decks stood waist deep, and no one sure of the way. It was said
that among the last waders were some who had stepped off the edge. Heavy-laden they sank without time to call out.

Strange the sensation to see the city cut off—the causeways vanished were a fearful sight, and maddening to the eyes, as of a figure hastily painted over on a canvas—there, yet not. Though in a convent one could not see this. To see nothing for oneself, this was also maddening to the eyes.

The city was made an island once more. Four hundred thousand souls sustained now by a few hundred canoes, their passage from shore to shore growing longer, slower, by the day. A few barges had been completed but the work had begun too late. For weeks now the water had depth enough for deep draft ships, yet these had only plied our lake once, caravels built by the marines of Cortés to lay siege against the capital. As in that time, the hunger grew terrible. The poorest ate insects and grass, fodder and rotting hay. The street dogs disappeared once more—into cooking pots, when there was fuel for the cooking. And now the soul of the people took instruction in irony, for it was noted that the residents of this city had always eaten insects and dogs. Other people noted differences: there were caravels then, and only canoes now; the mission of the Spanish, who were not loved here, had been to starve the city, whereas the work of the Indian boatmen now was to keep starvation from us.

From the want and the deprivation, the breasts of the negresses and Indian wet nurses dried up. And among the mothers better fed, yet who had let their own milk go, there was sorrow as the infants were weaned on sops of bread. Sorrow, too, among the wet nurses who had no sops for their own.

In a city all but inundated, there was some thirst and more fear of thirst. Many wells were already fouled by the water standing on the ground. And each time the earth shifted with even minor tremors, a clay water main broke in one barrio or another, and could not be repaired or even dug down to through the water on the surface. To drink that red-black water, poisoned with blood and mire and the offal of diseased cattle, was as yet unthinkable, even if there were enough dry fuel to boil it. But there was still the aqueduct, which brought good water from the springs of Chapultepec. For some, indeed for ever more people, the walk to the Salto de Agua was long, the wait longer, the return a long torment. Our anxiety in the convent grew, for should our water main break, our vows did not give us leave to go out to fetch the water ourselves.

And so when there came a quake not violent yet not so mild, and reports arrived of cracks in the arches of the aqueduct, there was terror. And the murmurs that the water would no longer come were difficult to quell. But there was still rainwater where there were barrels to catch it, and there were many cooking pots free for this, since there was little to cook. Our small patio sprouted a garden of such pots—of enamel, clay and iron—and though we could not hear it, one could imagine a music of water drops as they fell throughout the valley at different pitches into divers vessels filled to various levels. Such distractions were welcome and brought relief but not much, for the hours between prayers seemed ever longer. And all our prayers were special prayers, for the Salto de Agua, for a family, a barrio, a house. Many hundreds died.

The question arose, how much can a people bear? In the mouldering books many stirring answers offered themselves but the simplest was that it depended on the people itself. Some seemed outwardly strong but soon lost the strength of their purpose, the heart of their convictions. The fortitude of the
conquistadores
could not be contested, and even now the Spanish
tercios
were feared throughout Europe, yet the French had begun to say of our empire that while its limbs were immensely strong, its heart and head were infinitely weak.