Hunger's Brides (30 page)

It's not all ruined—think.

The couple enters the Night clerk looks up they ask for one with two double beds he doesn't automatically assume. Room 327. Just watch her make everything all right. Watch her make him promise. He'll say anything. Promise. Make him say it. He does anything she says, he does nothing unless she says. He says Nobody ever fucks me like this. Say it again. He fumbles at her straps. She looks down—the body he loves the one she hates spills out like garbage splitting a bag. He turns down the sheets. From the bed she watches him undress pressed bluejeans folded over the chair sportscoat hung on the back. Clean white shorts thin legs knee-high black socks. Through a crack in the curtains light catches lunar pocks on his round hairy back a hairy golf ball—she finds this cute she finds this adorable—shorts off in one swift wriggle and kick he turns back to the bed. He is already excited. Everything is going to be all right. He walks like a man with a trophy, holding it out, a man bringing flowers. She is calm now. Calm and happy. She does not worry, everything will be all right. She
will
make him promise, her holy host on her tongue. Push it back through the gag in her gullet, fill her chest her lungs with it, feel the sweet storm of grain slap her crop, warm her belly, pluck her up.

But calmly, gently, now.

And when she has taken him prisoner, when she has taken his life in her mouth, when it is time when the time is right, she will bite right through it, will cut him off from his life.

And once it is over, she will walk slowly not hurrying to the toilet and lock it carefully. She will check, it is locked. Smile into the mirror, wipe the serum from her chin her lips, from throat to chest. Turn on both taps full sink then tub. And alone in her little cave of rushing welling water SeaCow will let it come SeaCow will let it run. There will be enough. She will get it all. And she will be calm and cold and still as stone, once more.

At last, sides aching from the tight twist of her quiet retching, lips and gums all warm and glowing, she goes to him gratefully, her knees weak, head pounding clear and fresh. He asks her drowsily Why do you always go in and run the water after?
La bucca dentata
smiles through blood-shot eyes, smiles unafraid now he will see her teeth and says I got it all didn't I. Last drop, sleepyhead smiles. You were pretty rough.

You know, for a minute there I thought you were about to

I
had forgotten this. Now the memory brings no pleasure.

Even here, he said, even in America, we serve the Sovereign of Two Worlds.

We were at the firepit, just the two of us, and had spent the day together reading. The air was crisp and cold that night—up from our lips drifted curls and waves of mist but we stayed late by the fire. There were too few such days, such nights.

Abuelo rarely spoke about the war. The House of Austria, stretched thin between Vienna and Madrid … Turks and Moors to east and south, Bourbons and Protestants to west and north. Three hundred dukedoms and principalities tangled up in an impossible snarl of loyalties and betrayals. Catholic France sponsoring the Protestant Union, Lutheran Saxony fighting alongside the Catholic League…. Four hundred armies swarming over Europe like locusts, like packs of dogs turning on each other. The populations of Europe slashed by a third in barely a generation, thirty years of war …

“Half again as long as Troy, Angelina. And we fought for no better reasons … every duke craving a kingdom, every king an empire. No wonder Homer went blind, straining to see to the end of it.”

My grandfather volunteered in 1618. The truce with the low countries was expiring. Losing Portugal seemed just a matter of time. Everyone remembered that year, he said, for the comets. Three in the span of a few months, swords of flame over the horizon. This would be the Armageddon, the war to end the world. The important thing was to be fighting for the right side. They were just boys.

“No sooner had I survived the first campaign but I was
praying
for the war to end. The death, the rotting bread, the pestilence … Each Horseman had a season. Summers of war and fire—the cities went up like torches. Autumns of plague. And winters, winters were the harvest of the famine sown each spring, when the farmers were plucked from their planting and pressed into uniform.

“The land was exhausted anyway, not at all like here. Even when a field was sown, for every seed planted you were lucky to harvest six. One to replant, one to save, one to trade, the rest to armies and kings.”

It grew worse.

He had always dreamt of travelling. He travelled, now. Through the Spanish possessions of Italy to Vienna they rode, thence to Bohemia, across Bavaria and through the Palatine. Then up the Spanish Road towards the low countries, the United Provinces. In Westphalia he had watched mobs begging offal from the slaughterhouses. In Prague thousands had simply starved … tens of thousands more dying on battlefields and in
lazaretos
†
all across the continent.

“In '21 we thought it might be over, after White Mountain. There were such high hopes for the new king, though he was himself just a boy. I left in '24. Almost an old man already at thirty-five. And even then I was lucky … Lucky not to have seen a thing like Magdeburg, where twenty thousand townspeople were massacred in a day.”

What he said next surprised me, for I knew he considered it his great good fortune just to have survived.

“And yet, Angel … I never fought under Spínola.”
†
He lifted his chin just a little. “It would have been good to have served a prince in the field. But had I stayed for Breda, how many Magdeburgs might I have witnessed?”

With the tip of his traveller's staff he raked at the embers. I was not sure I'd understood him, and went hunting for the lines of Sarpedon, Zeus's mortal son, to Glaucus.

When I had found this and read it for him, I saw I'd understood him well enough. He didn't speak for a moment, but I knew he would go on now.

“The whole way back I walked with a bloodied bandage around my head, and when I think of that walk I still hear the flies buzzing at one
ear. Ahh,” he said, “I see you hear them too. I walked back to my village, but the want and the sickness were too terrible there. Everyone was gone. I kept on, following the south bank down to the mouth of the Guadalquivir, stood up to my hips where the brown of the river ran to brine. My boots were more like sandals by then, but upside down, so worn were they at the soles. I went barefoot down the shore all the way to land's end, walking and thinking and arguing with the flies. I looked across the straits to Africa, past
el peñón de Calpe
to Mount Hacho, and past that one to where I was sure I glimpsed the Atlas range.
⁷

“I stared at those mountains and thought hard about walking right down through Africa to land's end
there
. Angelina, I was standing at the pillars of Calpe and Abyla! Hardly a hundred years before, and for the two thousand before that, this had
been
the end of the world. But it felt in that instant as if its end lay not ahead but at my back—and I had escaped it.

“I unwrapped the bandage, and tossed it into the sea. I was not ready to be an old man quite yet. No, I would come to America and see for myself if the New World had an end
at all. Los Portugueses
were evasive as always.
‘Tierra del fuego' …
ice and fire, seas of fog, earth disappearing into thin air. What was anyone to make of that, eh? But when a Portuguese
†
tells a Spaniard about the sea,” Abuelo bent forward confidingly, his elbows on his knees, “you can be sure he is keeping the best parts to himself.”

Nodding assent, I fed another stick to the fire as he talked. The flames roared up.

“Then I met my Beatriz on the boat across,” he said, brightening, “a girl from the south bank, the village right next to mine. There was the end of one dream, but the beginning of a happier one…. And yet, and yet, who could ever have imagined it? That the horror I had volunteered for as a young man would not end until the year a certain granddaughter of mine was born.”

“Me?”

“You,
mi hijita
, you….”

How proud he was to have served, even an empire bankrupt and broken. Of all the epithets attaching to the Spanish king—Catholic Monarch, Planet King, &c.—the one my grandfather pronounced most proudly
was this,
Soberano de los Dos Mundos
. So yes, proud, and sad, and with a fascination for the death of empires that stayed with him to the last day of his life.

Sovereign of the Two Worlds.

When I moved from my uncle's house to the Viceroy's court, so eager to serve, I wrote an elegy for a king, the young king my grandfather had served under. Courtiers who had known that king sniggered behind their handkerchiefs—even those who had been with him at the Alcázar
†
as he died. Even my friends smiled and thought me naïve, made excuses for me.
She is only seventeen
.

At the hour of his death, it is said, every eye in Madrid was dry. It is also said that just three people cried—Queen Mariana, and no one could name with any certainty the other two. One wag at our court averred that it was not three people but three
eyes:
the last shopkeeper in Madrid to extend the palace credit, and his one-eyed wife.

I weep for the king who dies unmourned, I wept for that one, Philip IV—to have presided at the ruin of Europe's greatest throne. I wept for the prince born to lead but never shown how, an Alexander without an Aristotle, unable to unravel the knot in the thread of his greatness. For the dying empire does not prepare its princes for this. Olivares did everything to keep him from the field, built for him a country pleasure palace, the envy of all Europe until Versailles.
El Palacio del Buen Retiro.
†
A
palace fit for our century of ten thousand comedies. Such merriments the comedians made on his retreats.

Quevedo, for one.
Our king is like a hole. The more land they take from him, the greater he becomes
. I could never quite forgive Quevedo this one.

Philip was just sixteen when he ascended the throne. Planet King! they proclaimed him, that centrepiece about which all lesser bodies revolve like hungry courtiers tabled in their epicycles. Lesser bodies such as his future son-in-law, the young French Sun King, Louis XIV.

As I sat to write his elegy I thought of how he had been mocked, by history and by the stars. Forty years on, he must have seen this himself, as death approached, so elliptically. And seen also how he had been mocked by his own courtiers from the start. For, just a few years before the western Hapsburgs had acclaimed him Planet King, centre of the universe, the Hapsburg Emperor in Vienna had been studying astronomy. With Kepler.

Such a gift I have for seeing the emblems woven into other lives.