Hunger's Brides (155 page)

Eyes jade green. A gold corona rings the iris, threading through the spokes. Out from the centre, along each spoke an accretion—like coral, like rust … a burnt-amber wheel embedded, encrusted in the green of a stream.

One memory twists now in my mind's eye like a blade.

Table of whip-steel. Your knees drawn back for me, heels hard on the table edge. My wife's red silk negligee, too big for you. I stand, enter you, the window of your soul opens to me. A rill, a shimmer, a quiet welling … the bed of a stream.

A
QUEDUCT
        

[Mexico City, 16 Dec. 1994]

T
HERE IS A WORLD
outside this room.
It exists
. More real to me more true than I ever could have dreamed. Splendid in its independence from me. Teetering empire of the Fifth Sun, here I will learn to do what remains to do. Find my eyes of wonder. Walk a tightrope through a flame of ice.

And I will find you. What you left behind for us, for me, after three hundred years. I will make you speak to me. I will finish this. And I will make him
see
.

Am I idiot enough to think she is only there inside those walls? She is everywhere. Look! Here. She is on the new two-hundred peso bill! Backed by presidential signatures, legal tendresses of treasurers. Thank them for this, her daily omnipresence.

Juana, I have laid your beautiful face in the hands of beggars. And they have shown me where to turn, where to find you. Let the milkeyed beggars be my guides. Wedded to their hunger, uprooted from their lands, turned away at every city gate. The end approaches. See it in their inturned eyes, this return to the
land
, to the aleph. Let the end then be a return to the beginning,
to see it as for the first time.
¹

Nepantla. Your little village on the slopes of the smoking stone, Popocatépetl. Miracled birthplace on the volcanic margins of things. I will find you there, Juanita, in the cell where you were born.

Fond farewell to this my flophouse away from home—dingyroom, armoire battered under a hundred hasty paintcoats. Silverframed portrait of the baby jesus ruddycheeked and blond just above the queensize headboard of sin. His Sacred Heart—baled and bloody in its razorwire halo of thorns. In its Galilean necktie, belching aortal fire.

Taxi ride to the world's largest bus terminal. See it just ahead the purling gates of an iron embroidery. Flurry of a tropical dawn—taxis taxis taxis stalled back of trucks offloading pop, chips and Bimbo snacks. Bundled newspapers slung to the curb. Little dense bombs of dread set to whisk us away to a disquieting dislocation.

Ancient porter in rags approaches on enormous bare feet like muddy paddles. Scurvylegged and rickety. Let me carry your bag,
hijita
, you are thin. And you,
abuelo
, are very old. Let me walk beside you then to the gate. All right. Dignified nod at the hundred peso note,
handoff at the gate to a uniformed porter with an iron dolly.
¿A dónde va, jovencita?
—your ultimate destination dolly.

Trundle me up to Nepantla, home of Sor Juana. Ahh, this is not so easy, young one.

It's not far—
I have a three-hundred-year-old map in my head, so I know
. Yes but to go direct you must go to another place. Terminal de Autobuses del Oriente. Busstop of the Terminal Orientals.

On the east of the city. Yes it's far. Yes from this terminal here also you can get there. But you must go through Cuernavaca in one of these buses like executive jets. To the city where Cortés built his palace—

After he pulled Tenochtitlán to the ground
.

Don't waste time at the counter, buy your ticket on board. Well then amigo let's make this quick. Take me to the one leaving next.

And we are rising now up in our bus like a leerjet—TVs and headsets of success, lacy curtains and courtesy bar. Tissue-paper headrest-covers against the spread of skullpeeling mange. And even with this it is a joy to be out of this megacity of Dis / that has an end after all. A first-class fear escape.

Rising up out of the cupped-palm in the sky that is this Valley of Mexico, up through a vitriolic sunrise, sulphate strata of copper and zinc. Winding up the coral stead of a blueblack asphalt road, bends blasted from a pale puzzled brickrock. Gouged bluffcrests sprout stunted pines, asphyxiate and gnarled. Needle-clump branch-ends like clipped poodles gasping throatslit for breath.

Up and up into a raked light, into the impending rumour of a sky of faintest blue. Rising rising to the light. At the first summit through slantsmoked rays of sunrise, blurred silhouettes of volcanoes six kilometres high cast shadows westward and down through the gloomy lungstew.

And another summit and another, unto the confirmation of a blue empyrean assumption!

Now ahead—like
a sudden door opening onto the sea
a broad plain dappled like a feathercape of greens.
²
Cloudshadows skimming like tugs over a vast busy bay. Orchard grids of hunter green. Watercourses a treelined serpent twine of forest greens coiling through emerald fields of cane.

[Cuernavaca / 17 Dec. 1994]

Take me straight to the Palace of the Marquis of the Vale! Cortés's belvedere above his vale of tears. Hernán Cortés, first lawyer to conquer a universe …

His palace of toy Disney turrets stamped pure Castile—no trace no suspect hint of Moorish grace. No arches arcades no fountain garden in a courtyard more armoury than Xanadu. Is this the static architecture of your monolithic dreams? Views of your volcanoes forever lost now in the swirling carbondated mists.

O
marechal
of martial-awe! before I'm done here I will retrace your path of Conquest. But in reverse. Roll up / roll back rescind the sanguinary carpet of your welcome.

From here all the way back to the Yucatán.

On down through the sugar haciendas, third-class tour in a rustred Bluebird schoolbus. Racing over narrow roads through tall green cane. Water glints in the ditches from sprung aqueducts, dripfeeding caneworkers' vegetable plots no bigger than a tablecloth. Children smile and wave at the passing bus every window open to the hot gusts of afternoon.

Running dogs gnashing at the tires.

Señorita
, you are bound for the hacienda here in Cocoyóc?—but please you must. There is always a later bus for the mountains. You must see this place more beautiful than Cortés's own hacienda in Temexico. Just follow the aqueduct to its end. You cannot get lost.

Walk down along the white-arched aqueduct sprayed with official slogans. Red white and green of the PRI—ruling Party of Institutionalized Revolution
—
stamped on the arcadian architecture of yet another lawyer's oxymoron dream. Every foot of this aqueduct built by slaves, this causeway too should be lined with skulls like the Aztec carvers made.

Through the gates and onto the grounds. A walled colony for your security and peace of mind. Flowerflanked red gravel paths among condos lining a fertile crescent fairway. This—I know this now—is a bad
mistake
, but does the pilgrim come so far only to turn her face away? Forward hadji!

White golfcarts beating up and down the pathways ferrying room-service trays beneath bellcovers like burnished breastplates. Field ambulances back from the battlelines of affluence. Wandering over the fairways pale golfers—dazed wildlife stalked by brown-skinned caddies.
In tow, their aluminum-alloy travois. Mesoamerican wheeled technology still and ever reserved for toys.

Lush flowering trees—jacarandas,
flamboyanes
, African tulip shading unused swimming pools.

And then I am inside the main compound, and this place really is … a palace of dreams …

In, past the wading pools and arbours and cool arcades. Children's laughshriek voices fade … and I walk on in a kind of hush.

I follow the aqueduct. Ferns and giant rhododendrons, swivelheaded, lost. Reader's benches stranded in stands of bougainvillaea fifteen metres high, thick-blossomed veils of shellpink and vermilion.

Massive spidercling of creepers … dove-grey walls of adzed fieldstone, mortared.

What is this place? How can this even
be?

I almost turned away.

Wishing ponds of waterlily and orchid. Figs and lemon trees and oranges—dash and blur of hummingbirds. Faint birdsong and cicadas.

Here,
señorita
, take this.
Ándele
, take it I have another for myself. Oh, you have hurt your hand? I used to weep here too. As a girl, I worked here cleaning cottages. I had other reasons to cry then.

Small brown womanbird, wren-sharp features and curly-hair. Hardbead eyes. Shy sparrowgirl pressed into her skirts. To see this once I have brought my daughter. We live near the border now, in the North. It is a desert. You have not yet been to the waterwheel? Daughter, can we show this young lady what we have seen?

Behind one last wall the terminus of the aqueduct. Massive, reluctant, slowturned … a moss-clasped wheel. Black wood split and smoothworn by the ceaseless rush and plash and plunge of clear

    lithe

        water.

Tissue of muscled light, rent and splaying—knitting, mending as it falls. And you feel …

this plunge of beauty

    open a hole in your chest

      and plunging down through this

          your wide-cracked chest you feel

You feel—

this beauty bursting down through your lungs and down to pound—pound the drumhead of your brightwashed soul. Your breath quakes with it / you are breathing thunder. And shaking you, singing through you like a reed it asks how could they not feel this?—not see through the holes in their chests.

Sun.

    Stone.

        Shade.

            Green.

These things have no need of Conquests. Why wasn't this enough? An Emperor on his knees offered them a universe. They could have lived here as gods, as angels in the flesh.

As ordinary men.

Conquistadors you should have been the ones to kneel! Kneel on blackrot gangrene knees. Kneel on your iron greaves. Ever onward christian soldiers you all died broke—didn't you. Bleeding gold shitting piles of dysenteric gold
³
—dying poor, dreaming still. Deliverer! goldshackled dragonslayer—
merchant's dupe
—they made fortunes off you, the bankers' burros. You traded your own blood for promissory notes.

Conquistador … you had only to accept the world to save your soul. The world as it was offered. But all you saw was
gold
. Coins laid flat on the clench of your lids.

Your last will and testament, Advocate—your last temptation. So far from home so afraid to waver.
Liberator
. To weaken was to die overrun undone, annihilated by this siren-singing continent. Land of monstrous mystery. Grotesque mockery, Satanic Eden.

But you could have asked for the power to make Eden more beautiful than new. Where were your eyes of wonder?
Who put out our eyes
…

I need to understand. To try.

Was this a place of savagery because they lacked the
names?
The naming that keeps the wilderness at bay. So what about the nameless places inside? And as we lose the names of things—shapes and colours, taste and scents does all revert to desert again?—

Perdón, señorita
, you are from
el capital?

What?

Then maybe from Spain?

No
.

Canadá?—but your Spanish—I only ask … I have never been to
Spain, but I do not think they have such places there. El Canadá … you must have water like this everywhere. Not everywhere? You see,
niña
, not even in Canada.

Shy sparrowchild straining to grasp this. Lateborn to a grateful mother, godsent on a faded prayer of old rose. No keep the handkerchief, I can embroider another to cry in. You are leaving now. Will you walk with us to the gate?