Hunger's Brides (165 page)

Why do you want to climb this
pico de la chingada
anyway—because it is there? If you are serious about El Popo you must first get used to the altitude. It will take a day or two you will need a place to sleep. I can arrange it—you are not planning to sleep in the snow? When the tents are empty at night. Everyone walks back down to San Juan. It is about an hour on the other side. I can talk with my wife's cousin. There are blankets, there is coal. It will be cold but you will be comfortable. Yes yes I
know you can pay you are very rich. Come. I cannot go back to town unless I know.

Just think for a minute of the sad silence in the cantina tonight if I am not there. This is bigger than us both. That's better. We understand each other. There is no shame in finding me irresistible. We have already agreed on this.

Laughing man. Cedar man, cedar man with the redbrown eyes and hands, why have you come to me? Are you to be my comic Virgil, are you here to guide and keep me … company?

Then why have you come so late?

T
HRESHOLD
        

[18 Dec. 1994]

C
ROUCHED STAND AT A DISTANCE
trunked in trees. Watch the last of the tent people file back down the mountainside. Last to sink down the trail a ponchoed man with a car battery, shouldered. Beyond him the plain already dark, softglow of a city batterylit—Puebla, it must be. Raúl watches me from the jeep over on the turnabout. I enter the tent and only then does he ease away, switching the headlights on.

How strange this world, not Tibet not Canada not quite Mexico. Strange liminal noplace. Threshold, of what. Mystery of highcold and tropical wind. Volcanoes thrown up on a broken plain.

East, a smudge-sashed horizon skirted in dark. Evening starshimmer over Puebla's ochre burn. Roselit cone, canvasframed in the tentdoor, sky of lastgasp light.

Three greywool blankets stacked on a straw mat. Along one tentwall a palmwide shelf, waxspattered and low. Candles, like an altar and woven containers of tortillas, rice, beans. Clay
cántaro
of water. Papers and tobacco. Matches.

Brazier heaped with coal / tequila bottle of gasoline. Advance a trembling match to the brazier, my subway penlight clamped in lightbitted teeth. The gas flares sootedged—scorch and quickfade to a sulkycoal glow.

Windhowl and tentcreak … slowflag to silence and stars. Penhand cramped with cold.

Yellowing light too dim to read. Just beyond the door a grey shadow blinks greeneyed into a stab of penlight, dissolves.

Night without sleep.

Dawngrey slopes.

Blink into the smiling black eyes of a child. Day, fullday. Family smiling shyly from the doorway.
Muy buenos dias. ¿Durmió bien, usted?
Yesyes sleptswell—
y ustedes, ¿amenecieron bien? Sí gracias, muy bien
—will your Mercy stay and breakfast with us?

Hasty retreat before they check the altarbaskets.

Please you are welcome to sleep here tonight again….

Another flock of stiff-legged strollers stilting down from the first tour-bus then over to Cortés's sorry monument.

My beaten retreat deeper into the trees. Down the course of a brook threading farther into the snowpatched wood. Back to my little haven out of the wind, through trees fleeced in something like lichen. Beards of Old Testament prophets carved by Michelangelo.
With no more sound than the mice make.
¹⁰

Left turn at the omensign:
Areas de Trabajo de Control de Plaga
, my aegis my beacon my mission: plague control. A return to this sunsplashed meadow … tussocks of grass, daub and violet smear of mountain flower. Slip out of the wind into the bared roots of a pine, gloveclasp of spongy moss, soft needled.

Notebook on one knee … somewhere a woodpecker taps taps its hesitant braille. Smoked light, sawshriek of a hawk, or falcon. Scribbler, scratch this note … son of Isis, Horus the
Falcon
, but why? if the male is a tercel and the falcon a female?

And each afternoon he finds me. Cedar man, the tinder of his eyes tenderkindled to laughter, inflammable smile. River of baritone, dancing hands, the way he thumbs the shock of moustache smooth. Why have you been sent to me, handsome man with the redbrown eyes and hands?

How do you find me each time—are you some kind of tracker too?

There are not so many footprints out here, your feet are small there is enough snow. You see the coyote there watching us from the trees? I followed him here. You are lucky, it is a good omen. There are not so many left. But it is better not to get so close, some have a sickness. My presence is welcome?—but of course how could it be otherwise. I cannot stay long, this will distress you I know—my clients have given themselves an hour—a hand's breadth in the sky. They tell me this because I have no watch. Pah! My people know what time it is—both in the sky and in the earth there are clocks all around us.

I have convinced my cousin to accept money so you must eat the food they leave. They would never ask money of a pilgrim, they thought you came for a sickness in your family, or some problem of the heart—to San Gregorio del Popo for a
remedio
. You are surprised I see you did not know they call the mountain that. Which Saint Gregory? If you ask them this they will not understand. This San Gregorio is the only one
they care about. The volcano is very active now. Did I tell you they sacrificed lovers up there? I am not really so sure this is true.

You know Cortés sent his men up for sulphur for his cannons? Moctezuma sent runners every day for ice. Maybe for margaritas, what do you think?
Los pinches españoles
were always more afraid of life than we ever were of death.

Are you ready for your test after yesterday's lesson? It is good you try to see this place through the Nahuatl tongue of my people. Coyotl?—coyote. But that one is too easy. Atl?—water. Good. Tepetl—stone. Coatl—serpent. Very good. There, butterfly—Papalotl.

But I did not teach you that one … you see down there that cloud that looks like a serpent? Combine the words for cloud and serpent and get Mixcoatl—

Father of Quetzalcoatl.

But you know even this? it is good for me to meet a visitor like you. Ah look our friend coyotl is leaving without his dinner. Our talking has scared the mice. There he goes, Nezahualcoyotl, FastingCoyote. Do you know this poet of the Aztecs? In Mexico there are many great poets, but only two you must know and both of them from very near here. Once you could see both their houses from where we sit.

A breathlessness, under this sky. And still the roaring of the wind in my ears will not quit.

I am ready, I am willing, I am here. How long—two days or three? All this for what? Another morning of non-event in a rising wind. Another midday of cloud. Mountains—aren't there mountains enough in Canada? Pointless tremontaine ramble, listless wandering. Back to here. To her. Reading rereading her. For what—something I've missed? What hope of finding it now …
hope now sacrificed to hopeless love
.

I am fasted and clean. I am lightheaded and calm. And still you do not come to me. But you came up here, Juana, you must have once. Let me find what you found, see this place as you saw.

I have stopped the engine in my head. Now day and night all I hear is the howling of the wind. Even here where there is shelter.
I don't hear her music anymore
. I read her constantly now but I have lost it. I keep this journal still but I have stopped the chapters. No matter how I rifle this smashed jukebox for the nightingale's fled melodies—Keats, Rilke, Eliot, Milton, Yeats—